It has been a busy morning for Nina Nashif.

The CEO and founder of Chicago-based Healthbox is in town for the accelerator program’s second “innovation day” in Boston. Nine health IT startups will present their pitches this afternoon to a crowd of healthcare industry executives, entrepreneurs, and investors at the Revere Hotel near Boston Common.

You could be excused for not knowing who these startups are or what they represent. After all, dozens of healthcare accelerators have popped up in the past year or so, and with all the startups nibbling at the edges of truly gigantic problems in healthcare, it’s a super noisy sector.

That’s why I wanted to get to the top and see what Nashif (pictured) is seeing. Her training is in health administration and she’s a longtime business executive, having led international services and growth strategy at a Texas hospital, co-founded a wholesale business in New York, and served as vice president of Sg2, a healthcare analytics firm in London.

That was all before joining Sandbox Industries, a business incubator and venture capital firm in Chicago, and spinning out Healthbox as a separate entity.

Healthbox got started in Chicago in 2011-12, and in the past year it has expanded its three-month accelerator programs to Boston and London. Next up, interestingly, will be new programs in Jacksonville, FL, and Nashville, TN. And Nashif plans another session in Boston for early next year.

The biggest lesson learned so far, she says, is that “healthcare entrepreneurs need access to the industry, but just giving them access isn’t enough. We really need to help them refine their business model in the context of the industry.”

That means solving real problems, not going after perceived needs or operating at the fringe. “How do you make sure you’re building for the right stakeholder and you have a business model that will scale?” Nashif says.

One answer to that is pretty interesting and not obvious—especially for an accelerator. Healthbox is looking to diversify in terms of the stage of companies it accepts, Nashif says. I took this to mean admitting more established, later-stage companies as well as seed-stage startups—and it sounds like this is happening already.

As Nashif explains, Healthbox (and other programs) got started in part because of a seed-stage funding gap for young companies. … Next Page »

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What does an ex-Facebook tycoon with a degree in electrical engineering know about fixing the U.S. healthcare system?

Well, Chamath Palihapitiya knows that healthcare is in need of some drastic reinvention, and that to some extent, this will involve training people to think and behave in new ways—in much the same way Facebook has trained us to think differently about how we spend time online and communicate with our friends.

He’s not afraid to ruffle a few feathers in the process. That’s a good thing, because many of the companies he’s investing in through his Silicon Valley-based venture fund, the Social+Capital Partnership, are out to fundamentally shift the balance of power in healthcare and upend the way diseases get diagnosed and treated—or ideally, prevented. “Empower the edges,” Palihapitiya says. “That is the way you build a multi-gajillion-dollar company.”

Palihapitiya, 36, is famous mainly for having overseen the development of the Facebook Platform, and for coming up with ways to recruit new users during a period when the Facebook community grew from 50 million people to 750 million. When the social network went public in early 2012, Palihapitiya’s shares made him “a centimillionaire several times over,” according to BusinessWeek. He’s plowed much of the money back into the Social+Capital Partnership, which has also raised funds from Silicon Valley luminaries like Reid Hoffman, John Doerr, and Peter Thiel and invests mainly in healthcare, education, and financial services.

The Fenwick & West interview with Chamath Palihapitiya (right).

I interviewed Palihapitiya on stage last Friday at Fenwick & West’s Digital Health Investor Summit in Mountain View, CA, organized in conjunction with Rock Health. As you’ll see below, his attitude toward the healthcare establishment falls somewhere between irreverence and contempt. “The software is crap, the services are crap, the people are crap,” he says.

So alongside their investments in classic tech startups like Treehouse Island or Survey Monkey, Palihipitiya and his partners Mamoon Hamid and Ted Maidenberg are putting money into three kinds of healthcare companies that they hope can make things less crappy. Palihipitiya (it’s pronounced Polly-hop-i-TEE-ya) labels them “crawl,” “walk,” and “run.”

In the first category are companies like medical billing tracker startup Simplee that hope to make interacting with the system a little less painful. In the second are startups like Glooko, Asthmapolis, and Neurotrack that have ambitious long-term plans to build big subscription-based businesses around better technologies for monitoring and controlling chronic conditions like diabetes, asthma, and Alzheimer’s.

Finally, there are the Hail Mary passes—the companies like nanotech-diagnostics startup Integrated Plasmonics that, if their risky and unproven technologies prove effective, could completely change the economics of the business. It’s clear from talking to Palihapitiya that he loves these “run” companies the best—perhaps because they appeal to his personality as a gambler. To attend the Fenwick & West event, Palihapitiya flew in for the day from Las Vegas, where he was in the early rounds of the World Series of Poker. (In the 2012 series, he placed 101st out of a main draw of 7,000 players.)

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Xconomy: For those in the audience who might not be completely up to speed on the Social+Capital Partnership, I wanted to start by asking you to describe the firm’s model. To what extent are you trying to fix things about the venture model that you considered to be out of date, or broken?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think when I was leaving Facebook, my biggest realization was that the appetite for risk has changed, and the types of stuff that really intelligent people are working on has also changed, from really ambitious things to a lot of marginally stupid things. And maybe I was partly responsible for it as well. Building the Facebook Platform was supposed to be this great thing, and the first thing that happens is a bunch of people throwing shit at each other. That’s probably not the first ambition of what we were intending.

The point is, when I went to start this thing, the biggest thing I wanted to do was go back to some more interesting sides of technology—interesting things that were more technically difficult, but meaningful if they worked. So I kind of needed to rewire how everything worked.

The most important thing you have to rewire is your incentives. A lot of your incentives are driven by the people who are giving you money. So I made sure I put the most money [into the fund], so that I’m most at risk if this thing doesn’t work. And the second thing was, I went to individuals and really eschewed the traditional limited [partners], because I think that they are well meaning, but a pension is grinding it out trying to get 7 or 8 percent to meet an obligation for a bunch of people that are about to retire. And so their incentives to take a bunch of risk are very different from my own appetite to take risk, and I just didn’t want to be affected by those people. And so I just went to individuals, except in the case of a couple of specific limiteds. And my passion for healthcare came from one of our specific limited investors, which is the Mayo Clinic.

So that’s what we did—we rewired how the economics work, we rewired who the money comes from, we rewired everything, even our offices. We all sort of work in a bullpen the way we used to work at Facebook, and it’s just about building stuff. We don’t hire traditional business people. We only hire engineers. For EIRs, we only have engineers in residence, we don’t have executives. So it’s just going back to a more technically biased form of ambitious product building.

X: Does the firm work differently from other venture firms? Are you able to move faster, close deals faster?

CP: That’s my understanding, based on people I’ve talked to. It’s only myself and three other partners. We spend enough time together that we’re always in sync. We’ve made really big decisions in a matter of days, like $20, $30, $40 million checks in a couple of days. That’s potentially neither good nor bad, but it’s at least fast.

And I think often times what you can do is, you can basically get things done quickly. The model of venture right now is just a pain in the ass. Anybody who is any good will try to create an auction, because they don’t really understand what the asset class at its best can really do for people. And that’s because most people in the asset class are not actually very value-add. They are basically value-useless. They are just hyper-educated. They don’t really know what they’re doing. So they can’t … Next Page »

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San Francisco’s Rock Health startup accelerator unveiled its latest class of startups this week. It’s the fifth group admitted to the digital health program, which provides each of its companies with a $100,000 investment and four months of intensive entrepreneurship training, networking, and product design and development help.

The 11 companies are working on problems ranging from fitness monitoring to better drug development techniques. Halle Tecco, Rock Health’s founder and CEO, says the companies span at least three big themes: data tools (Amplify, Anapsis, Augmedix, Crixlabs, CancerIQ, Sensentia), sensors (Fluid, Lift Labs, Spire), and patient support (Smart Patients, Lift Labs, Thrive).

“This class represents the sort of companies we love—those aiming to reduce costs and improve care,” Tecco says.

Here’s the complete rundown of the new Rock Health companies, with descriptions provided by Tecco’s staff:

Amplify Health builds population management tools for at risk provider groups.

Anapsis is a research platform and marketplace for scientific and statistical computing.

Augmedix is a service for medical doctors that’s powered by Google Glass.

CancerIQ is harnessing big data to accelerate personalized cancer care.

Crixlabs builds software for de-risking drug development.

Fluid helps people diagnose the flu in minutes, without the doctor’s visit.

Lift Labs makes active stabilization tools for people living with tremor.

Sensentia is developing a new breed of intelligent systems for healthcare administration and operation.

Smart Patients is an online community for motivated cancer patients and their caregivers.

Spire is a wearable sensor that tracks both physical and psychological fitness to lower stress and increase productivity.

ThriveOn delivers mobile mental health programs from screen to treatment customized for every individual.

Rock Health also announced a coming change of scenery. Since its founding in 2011, the accelerator has been based in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood, but in the fourth quarter of 2013 it plans to move to new digs in the Mission Bay area, near the UCSF medical campus. The new first-floor space, at 455 Mission Bay Boulevard (near the corner of Third Street), will “have enough room for our startups as well as a community space for digital health meetups, events, and more,” according to an announcement on the Rock Health blog.

The 455 Mission Bay building is owned and managed by Alexandria Real Estate Equities, which has just joined Rock Health as a corporate supporter, along with pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim and communications firm Ogilvy Public Relations.

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Attendance at the annual Wireless-Life Sciences Convergence Summit in San Diego has remained relatively steady in recent years (the first conference was held in 2006), but there has been a phase change in the industry over the past year. As with many emerging technologies, the wireless health industry has been growing slowly, slowly, slowly—and then suddenly very fast.

As it has from the beginning, the conference remains focused on healthcare information and services delivered via wireless networks and mobile devices. But there is a different look and feel this year. There is less pie in the sky. Instead of circling “mobile health” or “wireless health” as concepts unto themselves, the industry is coalescing around the bigger idea of “connected health”— of connecting sensors and devices to electronic health records and vast clouds of interactive healthcare information that can be personalized for millions of users.

“It’s exciting to see the market mature,” says Chris Hoffman, a senior director at TripleTree, a boutique investment bank in Minneapolis, MN, and an early sponsor of the San Diego-based Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA). “We’re seeing real solutions with real opportunities for interoperability.”

One sign of industry change is evident in the makeup of the conference itself. Of the 275 people attending the conference (the number of registrations is limited), 25 came from outside the United States (China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom.

To Hoffman, the catalyst that changed everything was the $293 million deal that Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth signed to acquire Epocrates, the San Mateo, CA-based developer of the No. 1 mobile medical app for U.S. physicians. Athenahealth is a leading provider of cloud-based electronic health records, practice management, and care coordination services to medical groups, and Epocrates—as Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush put it—is the “Angry Birds” of healthcare IT.

Venture investments for digital health startups also increased substantially, according to Wain Fishburn, a founding partner of the Cooley law firm’s San Diego office and a life sciences and venture capital practice leader. “Last year there was a tsunami of dollars invested in digital health,” said Fishburn, who told the audience that VC funding surged … Next Page »

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Just a little over a month to go before our fifth annual flagship conference, XSITE 2013 (Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship) at Babson College. The date is June 19, the theme is “Boston’s Tech Revival,” and the agenda is here.

You can still register for the event (be sure to note our student and startup rates, if they apply).

I’m pleased to tell you about a few more high-profile speakers who will be joining us.

—Jeremy Hitchcock, the CEO and co-founder of Dyn, is speaking on the “Founders’ Stories” breakout panel that also features Diane Hessan of Communispace and Mike Baker of DataXu. I’m sure Jeremy has some pretty good stories about bootstrapping Dyn to profitability with the rise of the Internet.

—Jason Jacobs, the CEO and co-founder of FitnessKeeper (RunKeeper), will also join the “Founders’ Stories” panel. Jason brings a consumer/mobile and healthtech perspective to the discussion. This session is always popular, as it features founders of top companies being brutally honest about the challenges they’ve faced in building their businesses.

—Meredith Flynn-Ripley, the CEO of HeyWire, will speak on a plenary panel moderated by Olin College President Rick Miller. Called “Serial Entrepreneurs Club,” the discussion will touch on the need to innovate across sectors such as mobile tech, big data, social marketing, and sustainability. The other panelists are Ash Ashutosh from Actifio, Roy Rodenstein from TrueLens, and David Berry from Flagship Ventures.

—Bob Frankston, a member of CommonAngels and co-creator of VisiCalc, will talk about the interplay between opportunity and innovation. Let’s just say Bob has some provocative views on existing models of tech and business innovation, and how things can be done very differently for the betterment of society.

—Sarah Hodges, co-founder and managing director of Intelligent.ly, will talk about the state of talent and training in the Boston-area innovation community. Sarah has her finger on the pulse of education for students, young entrepreneurs, and transitioning executives, and she has some important suggestions for how New England companies can develop their talent base.

—Naomi Fried, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, will join the healthtech breakout entitled “Clinics, Corporations, and the Cloud.” The rest of the health IT panel includes Jeremy Delinsky from Athenahealth, Chris Boyce from Virgin HealthMiles, and John Walsh from CareCloud. Naomi will bring a much-needed perspective from the hospital side to the discussion of emerging technologies and business models aimed at improving healthcare.

—Our “startup Xpo” will feature about 10 seed-stage (or earlier) companies that we are hand-picking for their diversity of approaches and sectors. Emceeing the session will be Meredith McPherron, director of the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Meredith helped change the face of the HBS business plan competition this year, and she brings a fresh perspective to startup strategy in the Boston area (and beyond).

The full agenda is still evolving, and we’ll have more speakers to add, but I wanted our readers to see what’s in store for XSITE on June 19. It should be a fantastic rallying point for people who want to shape the future of Boston-area technology and business. We’re looking forward to seeing you all there.

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One year after it was announced, the New York Digital Health Accelerator birthed its first clutch of startups on Wednesday at a demo day—including one acquisition deal in the mix.

Pared down from some 250 applicants from across the U.S. and 10 countries, the eight startups in this class created platforms for referrals for post-acute care facilities and used data analytics to help reduce readmissions to hospitals. The accelerator is run by the New York eHealth Collaborative and the Partnership Fund for New York City. In addition to guidance from advisors and mentors, the startups in the nine-month accelerator program were given access to data from the Statewide Health Information Network of New York.

Only seven of the eight companies in the class demoed yesterday though—and that was not a bad thing. Remedy Systems, which developed a care coordination platform, got acquired in February by Remedy Partners. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Maria Gotsch, president and CEO of the Partnership Fund, says feedback from investors and healthcare providers who worked with the accelerator will be used to fine-tune future iterations of the program. The accelerator’s mission will likely expand, she says, to address more issues that healthcare providers want addressed. “This year was a pretty tight focus on four areas: care coordination, analytics, patient engagement and alerts,” she says. Those issues were chosen, Gotsch says, based on needs expressed by hospitals.

The Partnership Fund has been pushing a number of initiatives to get more companies growing and creating jobs in the city. The health accelerator drew some of its structure from the FinTech Innovation Lab program, Gotsch says, and can accommodate up to twelve startups at a time. “This was a mix of early-stage companies that did not have their first pilot [programs] to people that had technology in a couple of hospitals,” she says.

The first class got underway last September and—in aggregate—the startups raised $5 million, which includes $2.4 million already invested in the companies and a pledge by the accelerator to invest another $1.3 million. The next run of the New York Digital Health Accelerator is expected to be announced soon.

The companies that presented yesterday were:

ActualMeds: Software helps manage medication, particularly for high-risk patients who take multiple drugs.

Aidin: Platform to help patients and their families pick rehab centers and nursing homes for post-acute care.

Avado: A platform for clinicians and patients to communicate and manage health information.

CipherHealth: Uses mobile technology to make sure patients adhere to their discharge instructions after leaving hospitals.

Cureatr: Messaging system for scheduling and paging to improve communication and care coordination among health care providers.

MedCPU: A system that lets advisors alert physicians to deviations from clinical best practice protocols.

SpectraMD: Analytics platform for tracking performance at health care organizations in financial, operational, clinical and other areas.

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Amid the hectic pace of earnings releases, we saw a number of partnership agreements and other developments coming out of San Diego’s life sciences community.  Here’s my wrap-up.

—Shares of San Diego-based Receptos (NASDAQ: RCPT), a biotech developing new treatments for immune disorders, began trading on the Nasdaq exchange this morning after the company said it had priced a bigger-than-expected IPO at $14 a share. The company raised $73 million by offering 5.2 million shares, an increase from its planned offering of 4.7 million shares. Receptos granted its underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 780,000 shares to cover any over-allotments.

—Another San Diego biotech, cancer drug developer Ambit Biosciences, is waiting in the wings for its IPO debut. Ambit, which would trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol AMBI, plans to raise $65 million by offering 4.6 million shares at a price range between $13 to $15.

—San Diego’s Arena Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARNA) and its partner Eisai Pharmaceuticals of Japan said they can begin sales of lorcaserin (Belviq) as a treatment for obesity (in addition to diet and exercise) next month, after winning final approval from the DEA. In giving its approval to lorcaserin last year, the FDA recommended a DEA review last year to help prevent abuse of the weight-loss drug. Arena failed to win FDA approval for lorcaserin in 2010. The DEA rated lorcaserin as a Schedule 4 controlled substance, which carries a relatively low risk of abuse. Eisai also will pay Arena a $65 million milestone payment due under their partnership agreement.

—The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) said it signed a five-year agreement with Janssen Pharmaceuticals to collaborate on infectious disease research and discovery, with an initial goal targeting … Next Page »

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Capital Royalty, a private equity investment firm that specializes in investing in healthcare technologies, has closed an $805 million investment fund, the firm announced today. Capital Royalty is headquartered in Houston and has offices in Boulder, CO, and New York City.

The fund, Capital Royalty Partners II L.P, is the firm’s second, according to a release. When debt financing facilities available to the fund are factored in, Capital Royalty will have more than $1 billion in investible capital available through the fund.

Capital Royalty works with healthcare companies, research institutions, and inventors. The firm’s investment emphasis is on structured financings of commercialized biopharmaceutical products and medical technologies that have received regulatory approval. Capital Royalty’s investments are credit oriented and utilize secured debt, royalty bonds, revenue interests, and traditional royalty monetizations. Its investments typically are in the $20 million to $200 million range.

While the round just closed, Capital Royalty has already been using it for investments, according to its website. The largest investment has been a term loan facility for TriVascular, a privately owned medical device company that is developing novel endovascular aortic repair (EVAR) stent graft systems. TriVascular’s device received FDA approval in 2012 for the treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysms. In addition to the loan, TriVascular has raised $60 million in VC from a syndicate that includes New Enterprise Associates.

Capital Royalty also this year agreed to a $30 million term loan facility with Tandem Diabetes Care. Tandem makes and sells an FDA-approved insulin pump. Tandem can get an additional $15 million from Capital Royalty if it meets revenue goals.

“The fund is off to an excellent start, having already made several investments that are producing cash distributions for our limited partners,” managing director Nathan Hukill said in the release.

Capital Royalty’s round was oversubscribed. In total, the firm has $1.3 billion under management and has made 50 deals since its 2003 founding. The deals represent $4 billion, according to the company.

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If you try to keep up with all the business-plan contests and student startup competitions in the Boston area, you will go mad.

I’m making the rounds this spring, but I won’t be able to write about everything I see (or even most things). Instead, here’s a snapshot of three companies/teams that happened to grab my attention today, from different schools.

One company has won its competition, but the other two are probably not the eventual winners (I have no inside information to divulge, and I don’t know much about their business prospects). They just struck me as intriguing ideas for companies. And together, they span the fields of healthcare, energy, hardware, and analytics/software.

Without further ado:

—At Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition, which has its final pitch event later this afternoon, one of the eight finalists is Sensible Baby. Sure, I like the name, but beyond that, the technology seems pretty useful: sensors to monitor things like babies’ movements while they sleep, to make sure the infant is breathing OK and is not stuck on its stomach, say. (New parents are so sleep-deprived and paranoid, they’re likely to try anything if it works.)

—In the competition for MIT’s Clean Energy Prize, which will be awarded on May 6, one of the semifinalists is Bit Harmonics. This company combines two cutting-edge markets: home energy monitoring and elder care. Using analytics and machine learning, the firm’s software tries to figure out how energy is being used (not just how much) and makes recommendations for better device interactions and home living.

—At Tufts University, the startup Myoelectra has won the Classic Venture Business Plan Competition. The company is working on a rehabilitation treatment for Parkinson’s patients. The technology involves flexible wireless electrodes used to stimulate facial and throat muscles that help patients swallow and speak more normally.

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I’ve been coming to Texas regularly for more than 20 years—first to meet my future in-laws, and ever since to visit a growing extended family network around the state. I didn’t envision opening a Texas business arm on that initial visit (I didn’t have a business), but ever since launching Xconomy in mid-2007, I’ve been looking for the right opportunity to expand to the Lone Star State.

Today, I am extremely pleased to say, that opportunity has come. Welcome to Xconomy Texas, the eighth region in our growing national network, and the second cluster site opened in barely the past month (Boulder/Denver launched in late March).

I am also excited to introduce the editor of Xconomy Texas, Angela Shah. Angela is well known around the state, having worked at both the Austin American-Statesman and, more recently, the Dallas Morning News, where she spent eight years as a senior reporter and columnist covering economics, startups, and more. For the past three years, Angela has been based in the United Arab Emirates, writing about business, finance, and other topics for the likes of The New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, TIME, and Forbes Asia. Angela not only brings a great knowledge of Texas, but a world view of innovation, and I believe readers around our network will be treated to a special blend of Texas stories with global context.

Angela will be living in Houston but responsible for our coverage around the state. Her own welcome post will be coming tomorrow. In the meantime, check out her first news feature, about Houston startup Datafiniti moving to Austin because it can’t find enough software developers in its current home town—a problem it turns out other Houston companies are having (Angela gets at why). Chief correspondent Wade Roush (based in San Francisco) has also contributed a story for our Texas debut. He checks in with Siri co-inventor Adam Cheyer, who left Apple last year but who disputes the findings of a recent Texas A&M Transportation Institute study that says using Siri or Vlingo while driving is just as risky as manual texting while driving.

We have also posted our first guest contribution, from Xconomist Bob Metcalfe (Xconomists are our informal editorial advisors–the full list is here). Bob, a noted technology pundit and inventor of Ethernet, is an old friend from Boston who moved to Austin a few years ago to become professor of innovation at UT. His (typically quippy) post gets at some of the differences between Texas and Massachusetts, but also really celebrates what is happening in his beloved adopted state with the declaration that it is “where energy will be solved.”

Our launch in Texas is especially significant to me because the vision behind Xconomy is to be on the ground in key clusters, telling in-depth stories of innovation in diverse fields from information technology to life sciences to energy and more.

And here’s the thing about innovation—it has no boundaries. All too often, the business media misses what is happening around the country because it follows the easy trails in the main clusters like Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. We at Xconomy know there’s a lot more important work going on in other cities, and we have always believed the best way to serve our readers is to get those stories firsthand.

With the launch of Xconomy Texas, we are now in every time zone in the continental U.S., a big step forward in building a truly national network. (I’d like to make it a clean time-zone sweep, so if anyone over there in Hawaii can help us build our business there, oh, say around next January or February, let me know! Let’s hold off on Alaska until next summer.)

Our launch in Texas was made possible through the support of a fantastic group of partners around the state: BioMed San Antonio, BioHouston, Capital Royalty, Cooley LLP, Rice University, Texas Medical Center, University of Houston, and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. All these great organizations, innovative leaders themselves, dared to take a chance on supporting an independent media company—because they know the importance of in-depth daily information about what is happening in Texas. Thank you one and all!

Which brings me to another point: you will likely have noticed the new site is called Xconomy Texas, whereas all our other sites are named after cities. Truthfully, in all our regions, we cover stories far beyond the city proper: Boston editors, for instance, cover stories around New England. But as we talked to folks in the Texas innovation community in preparation for our launch, we got a lot of feedback that to single out one city in our name would be doing a disservice to the others. We therefore chose to make an exception with our name to symbolize from the start that inclusive view.

Finally, I want to add a special thank you to two incredible friends who were critical to our launch. The first is David Schubert, executive director of the Houston Area Translational Research Consortium (HATRC, fondly pronounced “hat trick”), which seeks to accelerate advances from the Texas Medical Center (or those drawn to the TMC) into commercial markets. David has known us since our June 2008 launch in Seattle, where he lived at the time. When he recently took a job in Texas, he reached out to Xconomy Seattle editor and National biotech editor Luke Timmerman and urged us to expand there. Not only was innovation abounding, he argued, there was a glaring lack of high-quality coverage about it—the kind Xconomy brings. David introduced us to a series of fantastic people who felt the same, many of whom became partners or Xconomists or helped in other ways.

One of those was Jacqueline Northcut, president and CEO of BioHouston and CEO of Texas BioAlliance. Jacqueline quickly grasped what we were about and gave us a Texas-sized welcome, not only opening up many doors but walking through them with us. I could go on about Jacqueline and David, but let’s just say that when we open the Xconomy Hall of Fame, they will be two charter members.

With that, I will turn things over to Angela. Texas is a huge state, but she won’t be on her own. Every editor across our network is contributing stories to help get Xconomy Texas started, and we have also tapped some great freelance writers in the state. All this was coordinated masterfully by deputy editor Greg Huang, while executive editor Rebecca Zacks and designer Rob Hunter led the integration of the new site into our network, marketing coordinator Thea Bissell worked tirelessly on production and worked with all our partners to coordinate announcement of our launch, and associate publisher Jim Edwards continues to travel far and wide building partnerships and business relations.

But we need your help, too, to keep things going. We hope you’ll let us know about story leads, and consider posting your own opinion pieces in our Xconomist Forum, the Op-Ed section of our site. For either of these purposes, write us at editors@xconomy.com, or reach out to Angela directly at ashah@xconomy.com.

Again, great thanks to all our friends and partners in Texas and around our network who made Xconomy Texas possible. I look forward to getting to know the Texas innovation community, and hopefully connecting folks in this great state to others around our network.

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Finally, the economy seems to be heading in the right direction, but frustratingly slowly—and peril lurks around every sequester corner. Is that the new normal in this age of rising healthcare costs, venture capital belt-tightening, and a nearly broken Congressional system that can’t see fit to invest properly in vital areas such as research and education?

Well, it doesn’t have to be. And fortunately, incredibly innovative people and organizations are working tirelessly to invent new technologies, business models, and strategies to overcome the conditions that have brought us almost five years of outright recession and lackluster growth.

Now, it is our pleasure to announce the second incarnation of an exclusive Xconomy event dedicated to gathering some of the country’s leading innovators and investors together for a front and center view of these efforts—from healthcare to cyber security to education, food technology, energy, personalized medicine, e-commerce and retail, and much, much more.

The Xconomy Napa Summit: New Rules for Growth will be held this year on June 3 and 4. We are once again convening an amazing body of entrepreneurs, investors, corporate innovators, and Xconomists—our editorial advisors—to explore this vital topic in a spectacular setting. We’ll have plenary chats and small, interactive panels, along with three special deep dive breakout sessions in healthcare, food and the environment, and energy. And plenty of wine.

Among our participants: Ray Rothrock of Venrock, chairman of the National Venture Capital Association; lean startup guru Steve Blank; Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler; Juan Enriquez of Excel Medical Ventures; Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé; Poshmark founder Manish Chandra; Internet and quantified self pioneer Larry Smarr; John Poisson of Wantful; and Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea. You can see the full lineup to date and request an invitation here (read on for more details)—and we will be posting the initial version of the agenda soon.

June 3, 2013: Silver Oak Vineyards (Oakville, CA)

Registration and cocktail reception begins 5:30 PM

Vineyard tour and dinner commences at 6:30 PM

June 4, 2013: Villagio Inn & Spa (Yountville, CA)

Program from 8:15 AM to 3:30 PM

Did I mention wine? We’ll be experiencing some incredible vintages both at our dinner at Silver Oak on June 3 and after our sessions on June 4, when venture capitalist Kevin Kinsella of Avalon Ventures (one of our speakers) will lead a special tasting of Kinsella Estates 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon that garnered a 94 from Wine Spectator.

We only have room for a small number of attendees at this invitation-only event. General registration is $1,250 (you can apply for a discount if you’re from a government organization, non-profit, or startup, or you are a student), and includes wine reception, vineyard tour, and all meals (lodging is separate).

To request an invitation–and for more event information, including the full list of speakers–please visit our Napa Summit event listing here.

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[Updated 4/23/13 2:30 pm. See below.] The year is off to a slow start in terms of venture capital investing, both for companies in the Boulder/Denver area and around the country, according to the MoneyTree Report released today.

Sixteen companies in the Boulder/Denver region raised $77 million in the first quarter, which is the lowest quarterly amount since the first quarter of 2010, according to the report. In the fourth quarter of 2012, 21 area companies raised $86.3 million.

Colorado’s sluggish start is in keeping with the national trend, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

One reason for the drop is that venture capital firms are consolidating, according to John Taylor, who heads research for the NVCA. Fewer firms are able to raise funds, and those that can are raising smaller funds. Venture capitalists also are investing less in industries that require a lot of capital, such as cleantech, Taylor said.

WellTok’s $18.7 million deal was the largest in the area. The Denver-based company is producing an online platform that uses social media, competitions, and gamification to help insurance plans work with clients to improve their health and cut costs. Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Partners, and New Enterprise Associates were the firms that invested in WellTok’s financing round.

Two other deals topped the $10 million mark. Convercent, a startup based in Denver, raised $10.2 million in a round that included Azure Capital Partners and Mantucket Capital. Convercent develops cloud-based compliance software.

Ciris Energy raised $10 million. The Centennial, CO-based company is trying to develop a system to convert coal to natural gas using microbes.

The figures for Boulder/Denver are for companies located in the Denver and Boulder metropolitan statistical areas, which span 11 counties around the two cities. There was an additional $1.9 million deal in the part of Colorado outside that area. In the fourth quarter of 2012, two companies outside Boulder/Denver raised a combined $10.4 million. [Updated to provide numbers for the entire state.]

The rest of the Boulder/Denver area’s 10 biggest deals of Q1:

—BiOptix raised $6.23 million

—Photobucket raised $5.65 million

—Novinda raised $5 million

—Luca Technologies raised $4 million

—Infinite Power Solutions raised $3.87 million

—Coalfire Systems raised $3.55 million

—TeamSnap raised $2.75 million

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The water’s fine in the healthcare-and-technology market, and institutional investors should come on in. That’s the message from Psilos Group, a healthcare-focused venture firm based in New York City and Corte Madera, CA, in an outlook report on healthcare economics released today.

It’s the fifth annual edition of the report, and it points to four categories where the firm thinks venture investors and their limited partners should be looking for new opportunities: the rise of private health exchanges, new insurance programs designed to appeal directly to consumers, technologies for making healthcare organizations more efficient, and tools that eliminate error and waste in hospitals.

“When we began this in 2008, a lot of people didn’t really understand what was going on in the healthcare space, or what the opportunities were going to be, or why we have a philsophy of investing in products that reduce costs and improve quality,” says Al Waxman, co-founder and senior managing member at Psilos. “In fact, a number of people looked at me quizzically and said, ‘Yeah, I believe in the Easter Bunny too.’ But today, it’s almost conventional wisdom that this is a great place to invest.”

Psilos was founded in 1998, has $600 million under management, and is investing out of its third fund. It’s one of a small handful of venture firms specifically focused on the healthcare arena, which hasn’t traditionally been seen as a home for fast-growing companies.

But Psilos has had some big exits recently, notably the $435 million acquisition last May of Extend Health, a private Medicare exchange based in Richardson, TX, by professional services company Towers Watson. The firm is also a backer of SeeChange Health, a Studio City, CA-based provider of “value-based” health insurance plans that seek to reduce costs for employers by offering patients preventative services that could reduce the rate of chronic, expensive diseases like diabetes.

In the report, Psilos partners predict that the reforms built into the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, will prompt the creation of many more companies like Extend and SeeChange. To help connect the 32 million people who will be eligible for government-subsidized health insurance beginning in 2014 with actual medical services, scores of new insurance exchanges will be set up around the country, brokering deals between health plans and individual patients. Waxman thinks the exchanges will also attract millions of people currently covered by employer-provided insurance, as companies realize it’s more cost-effective to hand employees the money for premiums and let them choose their own plans. (General Motors, for example, said it saved $300 million a year after hiring Extend Health to help retirees handle their own Medicare enrollment.)

“The private exchanges will get commissions for helping somebody to buy insurance in a way that is most suitable to them,” says Waxman. “I think that is a good system. You are going to have a huge number of people in this space.”

But to stay competitive, both the exchanges and the insurance plans will need to invest in the best new information technology, which leads to another of Psilos’s recommended investing categories. The company says insurance companies are struggling with decades-old software that isn’t ready for the changes coming under Obamacare, including pay-for-performance reimbursement.

“If 50,000 people were to show up at United Healthcare tomorrow and say, ‘I want to buy this kind of health plan,’ it would take them 9 months to do the software changes to administer new types of benefits,” Waxman says. “That’s not reasonable. It should take a couple of weeks.”

Burlington, MA-based HealthEdge, a Psilos-backed company founded in 2006 to help big health plans overhaul their claims processing systems and other software, is now one of the fastest-growing healthcare technology firms in the country, Waxman says. “I am sure other people will become interested in the health enterprise software area,” he says.

Waxman says the Psilos report is aimed mainly at institutional investors and other deep-pocketed potential LPs who are trying to figure out whether, when, and how to invest in the healthcare business. Under SEC rules, Psilos isn’t allowed to say whether it’s begun raising a fourth fund, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that at some point. “Given what we think are the opportunities going forward, we are actively exploring what we might do,” Waxman says.

But why would investors put their money into nascent businesses like insurance exchanges and health enterprise software makers now, rather than just waiting a couple of years to see how the reforms under Obamacare alter the economics of the business?

“I think you would see that the people who invested with us even before the healthcare reforms are prospering, because we were very good prognosticators,” Waxman says. “There is going to be a fundamental transformation of the healthcare industry, and it is going to be dependent on technology. We are very good selectors of that.”

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Eager to nurture ripe ideas from startups in the healthcare IT sector, Tigerlabs Health accelerator in Princeton, NJ today announced it has launched an additional program to match industry needs with entrepreneurs. New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Merck Global Health Innovation fund will help choose startups to join a select group within the accelerator—and leverage ideas that can be applied to specific issues that the hospital and the fund both want to address.

This “innovation track” is an addition to the Tigerlabs Health accelerator, which cultivates companies developing technology for the healthcare and pharmaceuticals industries, and will put mentors from Merck and New York-Presbyterian in contact with a specially chosen batch of startups. Bert Navarrete, managing partner and co-founder of Tigerlabs, says it is a way to speak more directly to needs of those sponsor groups and give entrepreneurs preferred access to industry players. “It’s very akin to the corporate venture capital model of making investments in companies,” he says.

Tigerlabs is an entrepreneurship campus founded in 2011 and the parent of the Tigerlabs Health accelerator, which was announced last fall. Tigerlabs Health aims to draw upon such resources as New Jersey’s pharmaceutical and healthcare giants, which include Merck & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Johnson & Johnson. Startups chosen to join the accelerator get $20,000 in seed funding and access to co-working space. In February, the very first batch of five startups was accepted into the Tigerlabs Health accelerator with a demo day planned for May. A second demo day for future participants is planned for the fall. Sponsors of the Tigerlabs campus include Microsoft BizSpark, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, AppNexus, and Twilio Cloud Communications.

Navarrete believes the innovation track will give Tigerlabs Health an edge luring in entrepreneurs to the accelerator. “We have captive audiences for them at Merck Global Health and New York-Presbyterian who will work alongside them strategically on a lot of their early development needs,” he says.

The hospital and fund in turn will get an early look at the startups and may find ways to harness their ideas to solve certain problems. New York-Presbyterian, he says, is looking for ways to improve its processes, profitability, and management. Merck is interested in new technology and platforms for working with data, according to Navarrete.

Tigerlabs Health has sought to be flexible, he says, with its plans for nurturing this sector. “Healthcare IT companies generally take longer to develop,” says he. “They take longer to execute on their sales strategy.” July 2 is the deadline to apply for the innovation track though the accelerator typically takes applications on a rolling basis.

Navarrete says Tigerlabs Health expects to host five to 10 startups in each overall cohort. “We have a bias towards companies that have a mix of business and technical co-founders,” he says. The accelerator has attracted entrepreneurs from Denver, Chicago, New York, and Princeton as well as from France and Britain. All the startups thus far selected to join the accelerator have either shipped or are monetizing a prototype or live product, Navarrete says. Companies that previously raised capital can also be found at the accelerator, tapping into Tigerlabs Health resources to help them go to market.

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If your health insurance company has you playing games, you’re probably not happy. If you talk about insurance or healthcare to your friends on a social network, the odds are you’re complaining.

But a growing number of companies are trying to change that by improving consumers’ experiences and engaging them—in part through gaming and social networking—in a way that keeps them happier and healthier, all while improving the bottom line for businesses and insurance companies.

WellTok, a health IT startup, thinks it can do that, and investors agree. The Denver-based company announced today it has raised an $18.7 million Series B round, bringing the total money raised by the company to almost $26 million.

WellTok also announced that Jeff Margolis, founder and former CEO of TriZetto, is now its CEO. He previously had been the startup’s executive chairman.

Margolis believes the U.S. healthcare system has many problems, and he has even published a book, titled The Healthcare Cure, about them. He believes one of the biggest problems is getting consumers to take better care of themselves.

“The promise of engaging the consumer in their own healthcare is the missing pillar in healthcare today, and it’s not being addressed,” Margolis said.

WellTok is developing CafeWell, a platform-as-a-service intended to fix that, by bringing together consumer engagement and social networking tools. Users can set goals or enter competitions (think “quit smoking” or “lose more weight than colleagues”), get support from their social network, and consult with coaches to develop strategies. If they stick with it and improve their health, they and their insurance companies could spend less money on treatment.

As a pilot project, WellTok worked with an insurer to create a program to encourage users to walk more. It found that using WellTok’s social network to invite users to participate and keep them informed about each other’s progress improved fitness and customer satisfaction. It estimated an annual return on investment of $584 per engaged member at a program cost of $120 per member.

Margolis acknowledges this idea isn’t new. Insurance companies already have invested a lot in making websites more user friendly, and exercise and weight-loss contests are pretty common at many businesses.

Margolis believes the number of wellness programs on offer can overwhelm consumers and such programs are rarely are customized to an individual’s needs. CafeWell will be a place where users can go to find the right program.

Many companies are trying to use similar engagement strategies to improve healthcare outcomes, but WellTok said its platform has been much more successful than competitors. WellTok claims customers spend an average of 50 minutes per month using the site, and that it has engagement rates 400 percent above the industry average.

WellTok’s release said 10 million people are enrolled in plans that use the pilot version of CafeWell, and that two of the five largest insurance companies are clients. It did not identify the companies.

Emergence Capital Partners, InterWest Partners, and … Next Page »

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Business plan competitions are in full bloom at colleges and universities around Boston. One of the most prominent ones, at Harvard Business School, got a facelift this year and is in the process of selecting its semifinalists.

The program is now called the HBS New Venture Competition (fka Business Plan Contest). The name change seems to reflect a dedication to helping students build real products for real customers—as well as a desire to stand out from other business plan competitions in the area (such as MIT’s $100K).

Leading the charge is Meredith McPherron, the director of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at HBS. “It’s a completely different look and feel” from previous competitions, she told me earlier this year.

McPherron (pictured below) joined Harvard Business School last August and has built her career as a marketing executive and entrepreneur over the past 20 years. She’s an HBS alum from the early ’90s and was a Harvard undergrad for good measure.

The competition’s first weed-out phase was “Super Saturday” on the morning of April 6. About 90 teams in the “business” track gave live pitches of their startups in front of select panels of judges. The result: 10 semifinalists, who will move on to the next round of judging. (I don’t know yet who they are, and participants in the other track, “social enterprise,” are being judged this week.) The whole thing finishes up on April 30, when $150,000 in prizes will be doled out to winners and runners-up in both the business and social enterprise tracks.

I got in touch with a few of the teams in the business track ahead of time, to see what makes them tick and how their experience in the New Venture Competition is going so far:

—Shana Hoffman is a co-founder of CareSolver, a startup that’s trying to help people provide better-coordinated care to aging family members and loved ones. The company makes online tools that generate a customized care plan and task tracker, while also including health resources and collaborative features to help people communicate more efficiently with their families.

The HBS competition “has been extremely helpful for us in developing the minimum viable product” and testing it in the real world, Hoffman says. The most surprising part of the program, she adds, is “the discipline that the exercise has imposed on our thinking. While we felt that we had a very solid strategy in place, the in-depth analysis and probing questions asked by NVC has made us really bear down.”

—Phyl Georgiou is a co-founder of Tiggly, a company that designs iPad apps and related toys for toddlers. There has been a ton of research and mainstream press—mostly inconclusive so far—around the impact of screens and tablets on child development. Tiggly’s physical toys (e.g., colorful shapes) and iPad apps (e.g., drawing) are meant to preserve the motor skills and real-world interactions of traditional early childhood learning.

Georgiou writes in an e-mail, “Many parents wanted to know the answer to a key question: ‘How do I introduce my toddler to the digital world in a natural way?’” He adds, “We think it’s critical that young kids play with real toys because they are a natural bridge to the digital world.” Georgiou credits the HBS startup competition, along with customer interviews, with helping Tiggly better understand its emerging marketplace.

—Kelly Schaefer is a co-founder of Fairweather Chef, a startup looking to deliver ready-to-cook meals to homes and workplaces. This is an idea most people can relate to: you want to eat healthier and cook more, but who has the time and energy? Fairweather Chef’s plan is to deliver all the ingredients (chopped up and prepped) plus simple instructions for pan-searing or baking.

Schaefer says, “We got sick of eating out all the time, and of throwing away groceries after the sporadic bursts of ambitions that led us to go grocery shopping.” She adds that the New Venture Competition “allowed us to run pilot tests to prove the concept, and we are now getting ramped up for a full launch this summer.”

In sum, it sounds like the HBS competition includes a wide variety of startups, a good mix of founders, and a renewed drive to be at the forefront of both local and national entrepreneurship trends. McPherron said that a broader mission of the Rock Center is for students “to engage enough in entrepreneurial thinking that they can have impact wherever they go.”

Down the road, McPherron says, that might translate into a scenario where around “half of HBS alumni, 10 to 15 years out, are entrepreneurs.”

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Graduating its third group of startups, the Blueprint Health accelerator in New York is increasingly making its presence known beyond the city. Late last week, 11 companies pitched their technology at a demo day that included platforms for improving efficiency at hospitals and giving medical device companies more ways to connect with physicians.

Mat Farkash, co-founder of Blueprint Health, said the accelerator has been working to prove it can bring together companies with real potential. “Two and a half years ago when we started Blueprint, there was concern about the ability to attract talent to healthcare,” he said. “Moreover, there were questions whether New York City could attract that talent.”

Farkash said he and his fellow Blueprint Health co-founders sought entrepreneurs from across the country and overseas to populate the incubator’s classes. The latest batch includes startups from San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as Florida and Britain.

Elizabeth Keyser, co-founder of Evoncea, talked about her dashboard that hospitals can use to increase revenue. “There is a huge opportunity to attract more patients to their profitable service lines through precision targeting and understanding what their consumers want,” she said.

Evoncea provides quarterly data reports that hospitals can use to tailor their marketing messages. Keyser said the technology tracks market demand at the zip code-level for each treatment and service option. Evoncea collects data from healthcare providers and patients on what factors went into decisions on care and where to go. The information is segmented by neighborhood, insurance, and other factors.

To match Evoncea’s data, she estimates that hospitals would have to spend more than $3 million to run more than 200 focus groups and maintain dedicated research teams. Evoncea charges hospitals annual subscriptions of $100,000 to $200,000 per service line to access to its data.

Keyser offered some perspectives, based on Evoncea’s findings, on prenatal care preferences in the Boston area. “In Cambridge, they are wild about water births while right next door in the Brighton and Allston area, they really want midwives,” she said. In the Beacon Hill neighborhood, according to Keyser, female obstetricians with at least 20 years of experience are in demand. “Armed with this information, hospital marketers can deliver messages targeted for their population that will attract the most patients,” she said.

Other members of this Blueprint Health class focused on helping hospitals save money and function more efficiently. The team behind startup forMD developed a network that hospitals can use to find and hire physicians. Hospitals using the site can post job listings, which are matched against the qualifications of the physicians in the system. ForMD generates revenue by taking a fee whenever someone is hired through the network.

Greg Chang talks about making the hiring of physicians more efficient.

“Hospital and practice administrators don’t have a lot of time to recruit physicians,” said co-founder Greg Chang. “They rely on third-party recruiters who manually source candidates, go through hundreds of resumes per opening, and wine-and-dine physicians to understand whether they are really interested in a job.”

He said it can cost upwards of $150,000 and take on average five months to fill one opening. “Every month that passes by without a physician in place, the average hospital loses $130,000 in revenue that a doctor would otherwise generate,” Chang said. ForMD’s network includes medical societies and alumni associations from medical schools at Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Stanford University, and University of Pennsylvania.

Here is a rundown of the other demoing startups from the latest class:

DocASAP — A platform that publishes doctors’ profiles on websites such as consumer health portals and health insurance sites with doctor finders.

HealthyOut — Though still in stealth mode, this startup plans to release a product soon to help solve issues with healthy eating.

iMedicare — A dashboard that pharmacies, particularly independents, can use to help their customers compare and choose Medicare plans.

IntelligentM — A system that uses wrist bands for ensuring that medical personnel comply with hand hygiene guidelines, and potentially reduce the spread of infections among patients within hospitals. The wrist bands use RFID and other technology to detect if medical staffers have sanitized their hands properly.

Keona Health — An online system that cuts down the time it takes for nurses to handle triage phone calls, thus giving them more freedom to care for patients.

Luminate Health — A platform patients use to access and understand their lab results.

Nurep — Gives medical device companies a way to offer on-demand, virtual support to physicians in operating rooms.

PadInMotion — Uses tablets to provide customized medical and entertainment content to patients at hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and other medical facilities.

Touch Surgery — Mobile software platform for medical device companies can use to show surgeons any surgery on virtual patients for learning and rehearsal for procedures.

Blueprint Health’s summer class is booked to start in July.

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The life sciences clusters around New York and Boston may sometimes act like rivals, but they also have plenty of reasons to work together. This week was marked by deals and cross-fertilizations between big pharmaceutical companies in the wider New York metropolitan area and small biotechnology companies in Cambridge, MA.

As for the East Coast-West Coast rivalry: Well, we’re not saying that moving east will make the fortune of a California firm. But a company that recently moved its headquarters here is enjoying some heady times on Wall Street.

—Shares in Optimer Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: OPTR) jumped nearly 20 percent Tuesday on reports that drug industry heavyweights were circling around with an eye on acquiring the company, which relocated its headquarters from San Diego, CA to Jersey City, NJ, late last year. Optimer is angling for a $1 billion purchase offer, according to a Bloomberg report. Among the potential buyers are GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK), AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN), Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CBST), and Japan’s Astellas, the sources said. Optimer sells the antibiotic fidaxomicin (Dificid) to treat dangerous intestinal infections caused by C. difficile bacteria. With its share price edging close to $14, Optimer’s market valuation has risen to about $690 million.

—New York-based Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) will collaborate with Cambridge, MA-based Bind Therapeutics on therapies for undisclosed diseases, using Bind’s nanoparticle drug delivery system in an effort to enhance the effectiveness of Pfizer’s small molecule drugs. Bind will receive $50 million upfront from the drug giant under a deal announced Wednesday, with as much as $160 million more for each jointly developed product that meets Pfizer’s goals. Bind had already formed a partnership in January with biotechnology giant Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) of Thousand Oaks, CA.

—Pfizer also closed a collaboration deal with another Cambridge, MA, biotechnology company, Tetragenetics, whose SionX technology platform supports the discovery of antibody drugs targeted at ion channel proteins. These proteins, which control the passage of potassium, sodium, and other ions across cell membranes, have been implicated in diseases ranging from schizophrenia to kidney disorders. Tetragenetics did not disclose financial terms of the deal announced Wednesday, or the diseases Pfizer is targeting. Tetragenetics also announced a deal Tuesday to license its technology to Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) of Thousand Oaks, CA.

—-Cambridge, MA-based Ra Pharmaceuticals landed a collaboration deal with drug giant Merck (NYSE: MRK) that could be worth as much as $200 million to the five-year-old company. Ra is creating a library of trillions of compounds called Cyclomimetics that are designed to have the specific drug actions of antibodies, while offering some of the advantages of small molecules. The company screens its stable of small, cyclic polymers for potential uses against drug targets. Ra will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and research support funds from Whitehouse Station, NJ-based Merck, and will be eligible for additional payments depending on the progress of the collaboration from drug discovery through commercialization.

—Cambridge, MA-based Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) has had a powerhouse rival since Gilead of Foster City, CA (NASDAQ: GILD) started moving beyond its dominant HIV drug franchise and building a major cancer drug division. Infinity and Gilead both have experimental drugs aimed at the same hot cancer target. But Gilead’s push into cancer has also benefited investors in East Coast companies. The expanding California company partnered up on antibody development last year with Lebanon, NH-based Adimab. Gilead also acquired Branford, CT-based CGI Pharmaceuticals for as much as $120 million in 2010. Gilead’s cancer program and acquisitions were detailed this week by Luke Timmerman, Xconomy’s National Biotech Editor.

—New York-based WorldOne, a health data company based in New York, said it secured a $35 million funding commitment from Deerfield Management of New York. Much of the money will go toward expanding Cambridge, MA-based Sermo, an online community for doctors that WorldOne acquired last July. Sermo will allow physicans to use the Web or mobile devices to track news in medicine and interact with their peers, while also linking them to the pharma companies, financial institutions, and other organizations that are interested in the doctors’ opinions and pay Sermo for access. WorldOne says its global network now includes a total of 1.8 million healthcare professionals in 80 countries, including more than 385,000 doctors.

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A pretty big deal in healthcare IT this morning: WorldOne, a health data and intelligence company based in New York, says it has secured a $35 million funding commitment from Deerfield Management, also in New York. The main focus is to expand Sermo, the Cambridge, MA-based online community for physicians, which WorldOne acquired last July.

Together with Sermo, WorldOne is looking “to build a much needed interactive destination for physicians around the world,” says Peter Kirk, WorldOne’s CEO, in a statement. The idea is to give doctors a place to go to collaborate with peers, read medical news, participate in market research, and compete in medical challenges—all via the Web or mobile devices.

WorldOne says its global networked community now includes more than 385,000 doctors (many from Sermo), and a total of 1.8 million healthcare professionals in 80 countries.

Meanwhile, Sermo says it has upwards of 25 employees in the Boston area and is currently hiring for engineering, marketing, and community positions.

Sermo was founded in 2005 and built a business around selling access to (and insights from) its physician network to pharma companies, financial institutions, online education toolmakers, and other organizations. The firm raised more than $40 million in venture and growth capital from investors including SoftBank Capital, Longworth Venture Partners, and Legg Mason Capital Management.

Yet the business had its ups and downs, notably during the recession of 2009-10, when cutbacks at drug companies and financial services firms hurt Sermo’s bottom line and forced it to downsize and shift its strategy.

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The cost of healthcare administration is a hot issue in America. According to the Center for American progress, in the U.S. healthcare system an estimated $361 billion annually goes to cover administrative costs. That number is a 14 percent of total healthcare expenditure nationwide.

Improvements in IT are expected to reduce these expenditures dramatically. The New England Journal of Medicine, citing the Harvard University Department of Economics, states that “The average U.S. physician spends 43 minutes a day interacting with health plans about payment, dealing with formularies, and obtaining authorizations for procedures.” In the report released by the Center for American Progress in June 2012, experts estimate that adoption of electronic transactions, or adoption of IT, can lead to a potential $26.1 billion in annual savings.

Here are some entrepreneurs who are making strong progress in the healthcare IT domain.

eClinicalWorks

In early 1999, Girish Navani attended a wireless technology conference in Geneva. There, he heard a speaker present his vision for the integration of wireless tech in the healthcare sphere, allowing doctors to interact more meaningfully with patients. Inspired, Girish lent his background in software development to a new venture with two colleagues, one of whom is a physician himself. Their project, eClinicalWorks, was intended to digitize the communication and workflow between a doctor’s office and the rest of the healthcare sphere.

eClinicalWorks is built entirely with its users in mind, using Girish’s cofounder Dr. Raj as a reference point. The end result electronically mirrors a physician’s workflow on paper and allows for multiple means of data entry to accommodate diverse work styles. Today eClinicalWorks continues to be highly profitable and has over 220,000 providers spanning all 50 states. The company makes well over $100 million in annual revenue.

Imprivata

Serial entrepreneur Omar Hussain was drawn to Imprivata’s blueprint for finger biometric authentication in 2002. After a few iterations, Imprivata launched their solution mid-2004 as a standalone appliance with an application profile generator that creates a single sign-on. In 2009, Omar noted that their swiftest growing vertical was healthcare.

Imprivata was a strategic purchase for physicians and hospitals in the midst of transitioning to an electronic system. With hundreds of personal records to protect, millions of dollars were spent on EMR (electronic medical records) systems that only increased inefficiency. Like Girish before him, Omar kept doctors in mind as he refocused to eliminate barriers to EMR adoption in 2010. “We had the opportunity to create and own a new market. That market is healthcare IT security,” he says.

A second product line launched in 2012 under the name Cortext. Operating on a per-user subscription model, it offers secure HIPPA-compliant texting for healthcare. Cortex proved as successful as its predecessor, with 40 hospitals signed up prior to launch. Omar intends to continue his campaign to improve healthcare’s problem areas – secure printing and electronic prescription authentication are just a few. Omar says, “My biggest problem is not a shortage of ideas, it is doing it fast enough to keep our client hospitals happy.” In 2012, Imprivata hit $54M in revnenue, 80 percent of which came from the healthcare vertical.

MMIS

A 1M/1M Million Dollar Club member, Michaeline Daboul, spent nearly 25 years working in pharmaceuticals and the life sciences industry. After work with several of the industry’s biggest names, Michaeline noted a glaring deficiency in current industry knowledge of new developments. She transitioned to a friend’s medical education and marketing services firm, informing practicing physicians of new drugs and treatments to enhance patient care.

In 1999, Michaeline took this work a step further in the creation of MMIS, the first continuing medical education (CME) company based entirely online. Business growth and industry interactions over the years eventually shifted Michaeline’s focus to technology. Today MMIS develops and markets software products for secure collaboration and compliance in the healthcare industry.

MMIS is the creator of three competitive central technology platforms to date. NetworkFortress is a collaboration suite allowing colleagues to … Next Page »

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