4 UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation startups that are changing care coordination

Last year the University of California San Francisco announced it was creating a Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI), and since then the center has been developing compelling new technologies aimed at transforming the coordination of health care delivery.

Michael Blum, USCF’s Chief Medical Information Officer, and cardiologist and clinical professor of medicine, was tapped to lead the CDHI.

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Blum is also one of the many bright minds at HealthBeat next Monday and Tuesday (Oct 27 and 28). With a year of CDHI behind him, he’ll be able to shed light on some of the breakthroughs the center has been investing in.

The four inaugural projects of CDHI developed in the last year all have one thing in common: They’re combining powerful health data with social and mobile applications to transform the delivery of health care. CDHI’s role is to provide developmental resources, while leveraging external partnerships to help the startups. These are CDHI’s first four startups:

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VentureBeat will be exploring a variety of key health-tech issues at HealthBeat 2014, Oct. 27-28 in San Francisco. Be sure to get your tickets today.

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Trinity aims to improve the way clinicians and specialties collaborate by creating what it calls “precision team care.” By integrating all pertinent patient health data, it enables team members to contribute remotely and asynchronously to the management of patients. It’s helped care givers build solutions to complex cases within 48 hours; something that previously took weeks when dependent on scheduled in-person meetings.

Careweb is like a mobile social network for physicians and health care teams. But this social network is designed to speed up and improve communication and collaborative care. The platform is built on the Salesforce.com platform, and the Careweb team thinks of it as combining the best of Facebook, Twitter, and a physician’s pager. Simply put, pages sent to providers are tagged to patients; messages populate a patient wall that all providers can see; and all messages are searchable. All activity unfolds in real time, which greatly increases the speed and collective understanding of various tasks in the delivery of care such as tests, prescriptions and doctor orders.

Tidepool is a cloud-based platform and suite of apps aimed at reducing the burden of managing type 1 diabetes. It’s aimed directly at patients and parents of patients, with a mission to provide real-time, accessible data about what’s happening inside a patient’s body that is immediately actionable — as they juggle blood sugar levels with day-to-day, hour-by-hour living. The first two apps include Blip, which visualizes all key data and Nutshell, which tracks historical data on responses to various foods (so a parent knows what happened the last time their child had a pepperoni pizza and can plan around it.)

Health eHeart is more research project than solution. It’s aiming to gather “more data about heart health from more people than any research study has done before” using a mixture of sensors, wearables, patient-entered data on smartphones, social media tracking, and on-site testing. By gathering a high volume of real-time data from patients’ lives, not just the laboratory, they’ll be investigating markers in the patient’s profile that might predict future health problems.