[Updated 11/16/09 6pm. See below] Microsoft co-founder and renowned technologist Paul Allen has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer, as of early this month, according to an e-mail message sent from Allen’s sister, Jody Allen Patton, to employees of Seattle-based Vulcan and its affiliates this afternoon. The message was sent to Xconomy and other media outlets by a Vulcan spokesperson.

Doctors say Allen has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, which is a relatively common form of lymphoma, and he has begun chemotherapy, according to the e-mail. The message pointed out that Allen “beat Hodgkin’s a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too.” That form of cancer is different from Allen’s current diagnosis, which is classified as a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is an umbrella term for cancers in which white blood cells of the immune system start growing out of control, according to the National Cancer Institute. The disease is the fourth most commonly diagnosed cancer in the U.S. each year, following lung, bladder, and melanoma tumors, according to the American Cancer Society. About 66,000 new cases are expected to be diagnosed this year in the U.S., and about 19,500 people are expected to die from the disease. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is the most common subtype of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, accounting for 30 percent of all newly diagnosed cases, according to an expert review published by the Lymphoma Research Foundation.

Vulcan spokesman David Postman wouldn’t comment on any specific questions about the stage of Allen’s disease, how early it was detected, whether it is an aggressive or slow-growing form of lymphoma, or where he is getting treatment.

Those questions are key to determining what kind of prognosis Allen has. His form of cancer is generally considered an aggressive, fast-growing lymphoma and requires immediate treatment, according to the Lymphoma Research Foundation’s description, authored by Carol Portlock of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Julie Vose of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, NE, and Bruce Cheson of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington D.C. The first sign is usually when the lymph nodes swell in the neck, armpit, or groin—other symptoms include night sweats, unexplained fevers, and weight loss, according to the summary from Portlock and colleagues.

A common treatment for the disease is a regimen of chemotherapy combined with Roche and Biogen’s targeted antibody drug rituximab (Rituxan), which kills excess B-cells of the immune system. The combination treatment can lead to a cure in a large number of patients. “Even when a cure is not possible, treatment can often keep the disease away for many years,” Portlock wrote.

“Paul is feeling OK and remains upbeat,” the Vulcan message stated. “He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.”

Here is the Vulcan e-mail in its entirety [added 11/16/09 6pm]:

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To employees of Vulcan and affiliates:

I want to let you know that Paul was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

He received the diagnosis early this month and has begun chemotherapy. Doctors say he has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common form of lymphoma.

This is tough news for Paul and the family. But for those who know Paul’s story, you know he beat Hodgkin’s a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too.

Paul is feeling OK and remains upbeat. He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.

We would ask you to respect Paul’s privacy and not discuss this outside of the office.

If you have any questions, please ask your EC member.

Thank you in advance for what I know will be all your good thoughts for Paul.
Jody

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The teams behind Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram Alpha announced today they have teamed up to enhance Bing’s search results across topics like nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics. Financial terms weren’t given, but the partnership gives Bing users access to Wolfram Alpha’s advanced algorithms and curated data. The move fits with Bing’s goal of helping people make decisions more efficiently. Led by Stephen Wolfram, the renowned physicist and mathematician, Wolfram Alpha debuted in May with the goal of making “all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

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Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures …Next Page »

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The role of information technology in healthcare reform is such a huge, sprawling topic that it’s hard to make any real progress in just an hour or two of discussions. Yet that’s just what transpired at a stellar event last night called “Healthcare-IT—Innovations That Will Transform Healthcare Now and in the Future.” It all took place at the Herban Feast in Sodo Park, South Seattle, and it was organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association.

Over some fancy appetizers, a distinguished panel of technologists, executives, and entrepreneurs debated everything from the technical and cultural issues of privacy and security in electronic medical records to who’s going to get a piece of the $19 billion in federal stimulus funding for digital healthcare; everything from whether consumers really want e-health enough to drive regulatory changes to—and this was particularly interesting to Xconomy—what the real opportunities are for startups in the space. The panel showcased some of the first-rate expertise we have here in the Seattle and Portland regions.

Moderator Joel French, the founder and managing director of Nephalios Group, a management consultancy, kicked things off by saying the whole healthcare debate boils down to four things: a cost problem, quality variability, access and coverage, and wellness. In each of these issues, IT plays an important role. “You can’t really share information if it’s not digital,” French said.

With that, it was open season on the panelists:

—Henry Albrecht, CEO of Bellevue, WA-based Limeade, an online health and productivity startup making software-as-a-service for employers (we reported Limeade raised money in July).

—Carla Corkern, CEO and chairman of Bellevue, WA-based Talyst, a company that makes software and systems to help pharmacies manage medications in hospitals and long-term care facilities (we reported on Talyst’s broader strategy and funding in June).

—Luis Machuca, CEO of Hillsboro, OR-based Kryptiq, a maker of collaborative software that lets healthcare providers share information with patients, labs, and physicians (we’ve reported on some of Kryptiq’s deals and customers, including NASA).

—Mohan Nair, executive vice president and chief marketing executive of Oregon-based Regence, the largest health insurer in the Northwest (he has a background in tech entrepreneurship).

—Michael Raymer, global market strategist and general manager for Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group (we’re reported on HealthVault, the company’s Web platform for medical records).

For the next hour, some tough questions flew out from the audience, and among the panelists. Here are my takeaways from the discussion:

1. “The magic pill is data liquidity.” That was from Luis Machuca, who argued that patients need to be able to own and access their own digital health information and use it to get better healthcare. “Universal health will fail, everything will fail, if we don’t have data liquidity and digitization,” Machuca said.

2. An open market, human behavior, and connectivity are important too. Nair argued that the present closed marketplace for healthcare services encourages entitlement instead of earned rewards. Albrecht noted that we should pay more attention to behavior, and less to technology. Raymer added, “Data liquidity needs to be coupled with tools to empower people to make changes, and connect people together.”

3. If you want better healthcare, go to jail. “We see the best compliance for …Next Page »

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If you’re the kind of person who needs a little help remembering to take your prescription meds, Cambridge, MA-based Vitality might have just the technology you need. It’s a wireless, Internet-connected medicine bottle cap that blinks and plays a tune when it’s time to down your pills.

The company’s “GlowCaps” system, which goes on sale today for $99, is designed to appeal to baby boomers looking for ways to keep their aging, forgetful parents out of expensive nursing homes or assisted care, says Vitality founder and CEO David Rose. But eventually, users might not have to pay for GlowCaps at all, because Vitality thinks the technology will also appeal to health insurers—and to pharmaceutical companies that want to recover the billions they lose in revenues when prescriptions aren’t used as directed or refilled on time.

The GlowCaps system is available exclusively through Amazon. It’s intended for people with hypertension, diabetes, and other chronic problems that can only be controlled through regular daily medications. In one beta test involving 50 Boston-area residents, Rose says, the system prompted patients to take their medicines on schedule 86 percent of the time, compared to the average adherence rate of about 50 percent.

And that’s bound to interest a couple of big constituencies. “There are really two primary customers for our company,” says Rose. “One is pharmaceutical companies that want to sell 25 pills a month rather than 15. If you’re a company like Novartis and you have a $2.5 billion drug like Diovan [a blood pressure medication] and it costs $4 a pill, that’s a lot of revenue you should be getting.” There’s also plenty of literature, Rose says, showing that high adherence rates lower the overall cost of care. “The other path to market, then, is the companies who pay for healthcare—both insurance companies and large self-insured employers.”

For now, though, Vitality is trying to build a market beachhead by selling the GlowCaps system directly to consumers. Inside the box are three components—a GlowCap, a reminder nightlight, and a small Wi-Fi router.

The GlowCap is the key component. It fits on top of a standard plastic pill bottle, and contains an LED light, a tiny sound chip, a wireless chipset, a watch battery, and a sensor that can detect when the bottle is opened. Most of the time, the LED emits a cool blue light, but when it’s time to take a pill, it switches to a pulsing orange light and plays a little electronic ditty. If the bottle isn’t opened, the ditties get longer and more insistent.

After two hours, the cap sends a wireless message to the patient’s home Wi-Fi router, which relays it to Vitality’s servers via the Internet. (For the system to work, the user’s household needs a broadband Internet connection with an available Ethernet port—and obviously, the cap needs to be within range of the router.) Vitality’s system can then initiate an automated phone call to remind the patient to take their medicine.

Vitality keeps records of each time the GlowCap is opened, and uses this information to produce a weekly “adherence report” that can be e-mailed to the patient or an appointed caregiver or loved one. The data can also be shared with doctors via online personal health record systems like Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and Dossia.

Then there’s the nightlight, which plugs into a kitchen or bathroom outlet and connects wirelessly to the router. It shines orange or blue in synchrony with the GlowCap, providing an extra reminder.

The whole system is about creating “persuasive feedback loops” that start with unobtrusive lights and electronic sounds, and escalate to …Next Page »

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Bellevue, WA-based medical imaging detection software company Confirma will be acquired by Milwaukee, WI-based health IT provider Merge Healthcare for approximately $22 million, according to a press release sent out today. The acquisition will allow Merge to incorporate Confirma’s technology into its IT offerings to doctors. Confirma’s main product, CADstream, is used for prostate and breast MRIs, with other functions in development.

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Limeade, a Bellevue, WA-based health IT company, raised $2.4 million of a $3 million equity offering, according to an SEC filing yesterday. The investors were not disclosed. Limeade provides software to companies that helps employees reach wellness goals like losing weight or quitting smoking, by helping them track their progress and providing employer-sponsored incentives. Some of Limeade’s clients include the state of Washington and the Seattle Mariners.

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5AM Ventures, a life sciences-focused early stage venture capital firm, has surpassed its $150 million target for its third fund, reports PE Hub. An SEC filing that indicates 5AM, which has offices in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA, has raised $159.2 million from 34 investors. Companies in the firm’s portfolio include Pulmatrix, a Lexington, MA-based startup developing an aerosol treatment for flu other pathogens, and Cambridge, MA-based Semprus BioSciences, which is making polymers that bond to the surface of medical devices to prevent clots and infections and to promote healing.

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Press Ganey, the South Bend, IN-based health care improvement consulting company that purchased Boston’s PatientFlow Technology in January, will open a new office outside Boston in Lexington, MA, next month, the company said today. The office, under the direction of Press Ganey vice president and chief information officer Jim Zeoli, will house staff from PatientFlow and will also hire additional software and database developers to help bring new products to market.

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Cambridge, MA drug giant Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB) and Hawthorne, NY-based Acorda Therapeutics (NASDAQ:ACOR) announced today that Biogen Idec has acquired the rights to develop and commercialize Acorda’s multiple sclerosis drug, Fampridine-SR, in markets outside the U.S. Acorda will receive an upfront payment of $110 million and additional payments of up to $400 million, and retains commercialization rights to Fampridine-SR in U.S. markets. The deal increases the Cambridge company’s MS drug footprint, which already includes Biogen drugs Avonex and Tysabri. The latter drug has come under scrutiny recently for its link to a severe brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML.

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Our Seattle compatriots have all arrived in Boston for XSITE. We wish we could say they brought the rain with them, but in fact, Boston has been far wetter than Seattle all month. The week’s life sciences news, however, isn’t quite the downpour you’ve all been dealing with outside.

—Wide-roaming correspondent Ryan McBride took in some sea air while attending the Convergence conference in Newport, RI. Policy wonks abounded, as the health care industry is nervously awaiting changes to federal patent standards, generic biotech drug regulation, and healthcare coverage. Ryan gathered insights on GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK)’s purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Sirtis last spring from Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) CEO Henri Termeer’s account of a conversation he had with Sirtis CEO Christoph Westphal. For all this and more, check out his report.

—Ryan also profiled PubGet, a Cambridge-based scholarly search engine aiming to provide faster, more useful results than the likes of GoogleScholar and PubMed. Instead of clicking through multiple links to get to the paper, a PubGet search will take you directly to a full-text PDF (assuming your institution has access). PubGet’s just announced that 50 research institutions have adopted its service.

—Marlborough, MA-based Exact Sciences is going back home to where the buffalo roam. The colorectal cancer test maker is relocating to Wisconsin after securing a $1 million loan from the Badger State.

—ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN), which produces technology to aid the effectiveness of antibody drugs, raised $33 million, after expenses, through a stock offering. The Waltham company sold 5 million shares at $7 apiece.

—Cambridge’s Living Proof, which aims to apply advanced materials science to beauty products, raised $9 million in an equity financing round. The funds came from Polaris Venture Partners, the sole venture backer of the company. Living Proof recently debuted its first product, the hair treatment NoFrizz.

—I-Therapeutix, a Waltham-based maker of tiny hydrogel-based eye bandages, landed $15 million in venture capital during a Series C Financing round. Between this latest news and the recent clearance of its flagship product, the I-Zip bandage, in European markets, I-Therapeutix is sitting pretty. The company hopes to enter the American market early next year, and is currently batting its lashes at the FDA.

—Norwich Ventures sounds like a great boss to work for. The Waltham venture firm loves to invest in medical device companies at an early stage, and unlike other, larger players, doesn’t pressure companies in its portfolio to sell or exit within five years. Hear more about their strategy in Ryan’s piece here.

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Framingham, MA-based Interlace Medical, which develops medical devices for gynecologists, announced today it has raised $20.5 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Baird Venture Partners and HLM Venture Partners and included new investors Hambrecht & Quist Capital Management and Aperture Venture Partners. Previous backers New Leaf Venture Partners and Spray Venture Partners returned for this round as well. Interlace says the Series C funds will be used to initiate the commercialization of its MyoSure system, which is intended as a less invasive method of removing fibroids and polyps from the uterus.

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In a private placement of stock, Marlborough, MA-based Exact Science (NASDAQ: EXAS) has raised $8.2 in new funding, according to an announcement today. The company, which has developed a molecular screening test for colorectal cancer, also said it has licensed technology developed by cancer researcher David Ahlquist at the Mayo Clinic covering aspects of sample processing and data analysis related to DNA screening for the disease.

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Boston-based American Well, in a one-two punch of advances announced this week, has added substance to its dream of giving consumers with health problems a way to consult with doctors over the Web and avoid more costly office visits. On Tuesday, the company said it was upgrading its Web-based “Online Care” platform to provide doctors guidance tailored to specific patients. And yesterday, a division of the UnitedHealth Group, the Minneapolis, MN-based company that is the largest private health insurer in the U.S., said it would begin deploying American Well’s platform to hospitals, practices, and patients across its huge network of more than 70 million members.

That’s a big win for the three-year-old startup, which introduced its Web-based patient communications platform last summer and, up to now, had signed up only two customers—the Blue Cross-Blue Shield plans in Hawaii and Minnesota. The deal with the division of UnitedHealth (NYSE: UNH), called OptumHealth, does a couple important things. It gives American Well access to that company’s so-called “clinical analytics” technology—which mines patient records for examples of gaps in care that can then be highlighted to physicians—and also clears the way for the platform to be made available to millions of people in all of the states where OptumHealth and UnitedHealth do business.

After the OptumHealth announcement, I reached Roy Schoenberg, CEO of American Well Systems, and asked him to explain both developments in more detail. (American Well Systems is the operational side of the venture; Roy’s brother and co-founder Ido Schoenberg is CEO of American Well Incorporated, the business side.) He talked about how the OptumHealth agreement will speed up deployment of American Well’s technology. And he differed with my own diagnosis about the slowness of the rollout so far, saying that he believes the platform is being adopted at a “staggering, unbelievable pace” considering the conservative (some would say anti-technology) nature of the healthcare industry, which still relies heavily on old-fashioned paper records.

Here’s a full writeup of our interview, which was conducted Wednesday.

Xconomy: Before we talk about your agreement with OptumHealth, can you explain the core of the news you released yesterday, about an upgrade to your own Online Care platform?

Roy Schoenberg: The release that came out yesterday was about the unveiling of what we call internally Version 3.0 of the Online Care platform. It has better, broader administrative capabilities and other things that improve the experience based on what we’ve learned from users in Hawaii and Minnesota. But probably the most important feature that has been added is a thing called Online Care Insight. It’s very possible that a patient [using our system] will be seen by a provider with whom they have not had a previous encounter. Which means that anything we can do to equip the provider with insights—not only about who the patient is, in terms of their medical record, which has been there from the very first release, but really what needs to be done for the patient, what are the gaps in care, the appropriate medication changes—will go a long way to make sure the encounter represents a higher quality of care.

The way this is done is by taking advantage of expert systems, called clinical analytics systems in the business, which are very large computer systems typically deployed by large organizations like health plans to review the current healthcare activity of patients to identify such gaps. A typical example would be if a patient has diabetes and they haven’t had an eye exam, which is very important to prevent blindness. These systems will pick that up and drive communication to a physician or a care manager to say, “Listen, you really need to do an eye exam.”

Many such insights are generated by these systems, but until today, typically the results of those insights are, in the best case, the plan would send a letter to the physician saying that when you see the patient next you need to advise them about this thing. But as you can imagine, physicians typically don’t read mass mail, and don’t necessarily follow them. What we have now is the opportunity to engage those [expert] systems in real time when the patient is about to come together with a physician on our system. It brings them directly to the console. So the first time we are literally harvesting the immense computer power of these systems and bringing them into the care encounter.

X: From what I’ve read about OptumHealth’s eSync platform, it sounds like the expert systems or clinical analytics that you’re talking about is a big part of what they provide.

RS: ESync represents the front end of all of these analytics systems that Optum has developed and put in place. They have the ability to generate all of these messages about what needs to be done for the patient. But the big change is to be able to inject that information into the right place at the right time, so the physician can take advantage of it with the patient they are encountering right now. That ability is unique to Online Care. Before Online Care, when a patient was seen by a physician, there was no computer between the two.

X: Well, actually, there has been a computer in the room during almost every medical encounter I’ve had in the last several years.

RS: There is a computer. The question is whether the physician is going to log onto a system and read what that system is telling them about …Next Page »

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The five track winners for the MIT 100K business plan competition were announced on Friday. These teams will compete in the finals on Wednesday, along with the winner of its sister contest, the MIT Clean Energy Prize competition (that team will be announced next Tuesday). All five track winners, and three of the five Energy Prize finalists (all those with MIT ties), gathered Friday night at Bob Metcalfe’s house in the Back Bay for a small celebration of their making it so far.

Metcalfe, now a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners, has hosted a party for the 100K finalists for many years. As is also the tradition, finalists select one team member to stand on the stairs leading to the second floor, while guests gather in the foyer below them to hear their very short (60-second or so) pitches. I’ve been to several of these gatherings, and others that are similar—and always enjoy them. This year, though, the teams seemed to have risen to another level in terms of both their poise and the sophistication of their pitches. For the first time, I came away pretty sure that not only would a few of these plans turns into real businesses, but that one or two might even be significant businesses. (So, hey—remember when Xconomy spotted you.)

Below are my capsule descriptions of the eight finalists (out of some 260 that entered the two competitions), along with a few impressions. Congratulations to all:

—-Ksplice (100K Web/IT track winner): This teams wins the prize for most rarin’ to go, for sure. When someone asked who wanted to start things off, Waseem Daher’s hand shot up as fast as an Olympic badminton player reacting to a smash. What he was so eager to talk about is technology that enables the installation of operating system and application updates on running systems, without the need for rebooting the computer or restarting the application. The initial target market is enterprise systems, where such updates mean downtime and lost productivity, according to Daher. Although Ksplice only works on Linux systems right now, he envisions every operating system and application employing the technology for software updates. Impression: strikes a universal chord in computer users—big potential royalty market.

—YouTea! (100K Product and Services track winner): Urinary tract infections strike 11 percent of women each year, according to team spokesperson Alex Herzlinger. YouTea! has a new way to deliver a preventative medicine through “a low-calorie, great tasting” drink, I guess called YouTea!. The team was also a finalist in the Harvard Business Plan competition, where it said it planned to the deliver YouTea! first in powdered form, then in a bottle. Impression: Big market need, but might consider a new name (I thought they were saying UT, as in the University of Texas, hook ‘em). And, even if it really does taste great, there’s always the question of how many people will take preventative measures in the first place (see Cambridge Eyenovations below).

—Sun Point (Energy prize finalist, winner of renewables category): Eric Cohen described a passive solar tracker, with no motors, gears, or drive train (at least I think I got that right). It goes …Next Page »

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For hundreds of years, students and spectators could gather in operating theaters like the Ether Dome at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital to watch doctors perform surgery. Now IBM and researchers at another famous Boston hospital, Brigham and Women’s, have developed a tool that lets many physicians gather virutally to get a good look at a single patient. Called the Radiology Theatre, it’s a secure Web-based collaboration environment where teams of doctors in different locations can examine high-resolution CT scans, MRIs, and other test results and discuss the information over audio and video links.

“We are not all in the same location, and the information that’s needed to take care of patients does not all come from the same place,” says Francine Jacobson, a thoracic radiologist at Brigham and Women’s who is the lead investigator working with IBM’s software engineers. “Bringing together both the data and the radiologists in the same Web browser in a truly interactive manner, and avoiding a lot of the compatibility issues we’ve had in the past, is truly exciting.”

Officially unveiled today, the Radiology Theatre is essentially a mashup of free and open-source software components—such as the WebKit browser engine, the OpenAjax Hub, and the Oviyam medical image browser (developed in India)—that IBM has integrated using a proprietary Web application development platform called Blue Spruce. The system makes it easy to combine multiple types of Web resources and communications tools, such as maps, images, chat interfaces, whiteboards, and live webcam video, inside a single browser window. Over the last few months, IBM’s Emerging Internet Technology Group has been demonstrating several proof-of-concept projects built on Blue Spruce, including a news browser for financial analysts and a map-based collaboration platform for real estate investors.

The Radiology Theatre is the first telemedicine application for Blue Spruce. “The fundamental reason we did this was that everybody has been trying to replicate the power of face-to-face interactions, but they haven’t gotten there, because the images aren’t clear enough or the network isn’t fast enough or they could share certain kinds of data in a Web conference but they’d have to send other data by e-mail,” says David Boloker, the Brookline, MA-based chief technology officer for the Emerging Internet Technology Group. “We wanted to see how far we could extend the browser with high-definition video and audio and multi-user interactions, all on the same Web page.”

While TV doctors still gather in hushed radiology rooms to scrutinize film-based X-rays and CT scans on light boards, nearly all medical images are now captured digitally. In the Radiology Theatre, physicians logging in from different locations can call up these digital images from hospital databases, zoom in on specific sections of the images, use whiteboard tools to draw on the images, and consult in real time via webcam. Boloker says the initial idea for the system came from discussions with radiologists in Melbourne, Australia, who needed a better way to consult with physicians in rural clinics in Australia’s Northern Territory, thousands of miles away. But the same technologies that lets doctors communicate with other doctors could eventually be used to help far-away doctors communicate with patients, says Boloker. “You can do it all via the Web,” he says.

Jacobson has been using the Radiology Theatre to explore CT data and pulmonary function test results from patients involved in a long-term study of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) funded by the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute. She’s not making use of the system’s collaboration features, at the moment, but she says just being able to combine several types of data on the same screen is valuable. “When you’re looking for things that will lead to earlier identification of disease states, it’s important to learn what subtle things that we might consider normal that we should notice,” Jacobson says. With Radiology Theature, “We can look at the density of lung tissue in a particular area while at the same time looking at the pulmonary function test.”

Jacobson says she expects the Radiology Theatre to come in handy as she gets deeper into a multi-center study of the genetic epidemiology of COPD that involves researchers in Denver. But collaborators don’t have to be thousands of miles away: she says the Radiology Theatre might also help doctors at the Brigham intensive care unit who need to consult with experts across the street at the new Shapiro Cardiovascular Center. “I think as medicine has become more specialized, we are less co-located, and more based in the particular clinics where we work,” Jacobson says. “We’re all very busy, so getting together is not easy.”

IBM doesn’t have immediate plans to turn the Radiology Theatre into a commercial product, but it views the underlying Blue Spruce platform as part of its bid to influence the burgeoning market for cooperative, browser-based applications. And Boloker says he views the Radiology Theatre “as a platform that we could easily built a product on in the future.” While many of the individual components of the radiology environment are based on open-source software, and might therefore be easy for competitors to replicate, “the core platform—including audio and video and multi-user interaction—is all IBM technology,” Boloker says. “We’ve made it much easier to bring in widgets from here and there and make them all work together in a secure way.”

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Reading, MA-based Vitalize Consulting Services, which manages IT implementation projects for big healthcare companies, announced today that it has acquired rival r3 Health Partners of Santa Ana, CA. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Vitalize is backed by SV Life Sciences, Ferrer Freeman and Company, and Bank of America.

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Boston-based PatientFlow Technology, which makes software that helps hospitals deal with backups in emergency rooms, ICUs, and other care settings, has been acquired by health care improvement consulting company Press Ganey of South Bend, IN, according to an announcement today. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said that the acquisition would not lead to any layoffs at PatientFlow.

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Seattle and Boston, two of Xconomy’s network cities, have something extra to be proud of today—at least when it comes to Internet startups. Each city contributed two companies to a popular list of the year’s best Web applications for improving customers’ real lives.

That’s according to the tech-news blog ReadWriteWeb, which has published its list of the “top 10 real world Web apps of 2008.” These are Web services that help keep people’s offline lives more organized and efficient. The categories were finance, health, education, politics, nonprofits, and travel. Without further ado:

—In Seattle, the teacher/student community site TeachStreet won in the education category, while the airfare-tracking site Yapta won in travel. TeachStreet expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area last month, from Seattle and Portland. Yapta is in the process of closing a funding round of at least $2.7 million.

—In the Boston area, the social-networking sites PatientsLikeMe and Sermo, both based in Cambridge, MA, won in the health category. PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease, HIV, and Parkinson’s disease. Sermo is a site where 90,000 doctors exchange information about medical practice. Sermo recently signed a deal to open up access to this network to financial industry experts who subscribe to the Bloomberg Professional information service.

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One thing leads to another, especially for reporters. After we published our Boston Health 2.0 Cluster story in June, I started getting a lot of invitations to attend and/or moderate local events relating the Web’s influence on the healthcare market. One such event was a weekend brunch hosted by IC Sciences executive vice president Steve Wardell, where the guest of honor was Amir Lewkowicz, co-founder and vice president of partnerships at Inspire (known until this February as Clinica Health).

Often held up as one of the standard-bearers of the Health 2.0 movement, Inspire hosts Web-based communities for disease sufferers and their caregivers, and earns money by arranging for pharmaceutical and device companies to recruit community members as volunteers for clinical trials. Lewkowicz runs the Newton, MA, offices of Inspire, which is headquartered in Princeton, NJ. A couple of weeks after the brunch, I met him for coffee in Coolidge Corner and got a chance to interview him at length about Inspire’s business model, which is a synthesis of social-networking ideas Lewkowicz picked up while earning an MBA at Wellesley’s Babson College several years ago and knowledge of the clinical-trials process brought by his co-founder, Brian Loew.

The 10-person startup’s focus, Lewkowicz explained, is on the kind of crowdsourcing now classic in the Web 2.0 world. Specifically, the company helps existing health- and disease-oriented organizations, such as the ALS Foundation or the National Infertility Association, create online communities where members can share their own experiences and knowledge. It’s an itch that apparently needed scratching: more than 80,000 people have joined Inspire’s 40-plus communities since its first social network was launched in 2006. But along the way, Inspire has also been able to fill a second need—for qualified participants in trials of new drugs, a scarce resource that pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars each year seeking out. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: How did the idea for Inspire come together?

Amir Lewkowicz: Brian Loew and I have known each other for many years. We went to undergraduate school together. The idea came about in 2004-2005, along two different paths. Brian was looking at the clinical trials area and found that the biggest issue people were talking about was finding the right people for clinical trials. The number-one reason for delays with trials and bringing drugs to market was that researchers couldn’t find enough people.

At the same time, I was doing my MBA at Babson, and had just taken one of those classes that changes your whole view of things. It was called “Extended Enterprise Management” and was taught by Marty Anderson. I thought it would be about operations and supply chains, but he introduced the whole concept of social networks. This was in 2003, when social networking was not really mainstream. He blew me away. The way he positioned it was that if you build your company around direct input from the consumer, it changes your whole way of looking at things.

Well, at Babson it’s kind of like a religion to start your own company. They really push you—but in a structured, good way. I was in touch with Brian, and we started talking. At the same time, I had a personal thing—my sister and I suspected that one of our parents had a specific condition. We went online looking for authoritative content and had a very frustrating time. The online groups weren’t structured very well. But I was using LinkedIn and was getting a lot of benefit out of it. I wondered why this couldn’t be done for healthcare also.

Brian had started a company in the 1990s called WorldWeb, a content-management company kind of like Vignette, and had sold the company and then joined the Washington Post, where he was helping with technology strategy and social media. So the idea germinated—why not create a place for people with health conditions to support each other, but at the same time use it to recruit for clinical trials. It was a perfect-storm scenario.

X: But isn’t it pretty difficult to create a social network from scratch and get to critical mass where you have people generating useful content?

AL: We always believed we would partner with health organizations. We went to hundreds of websites to see what kinds of tools they had, and at the time about 25 percent of patient advocacy groups, hospitals, medical groups, and disease-oriented organizations had some sort of social media, mostly discussion boards. We saw an opportunity to partner with these groups.

The first few months was doing the market research, seeing what the potential partners needed, and working on a prototype. We didn’t raise any money; our wives were our first investors, essentially.

After a few months, we raised some angel money, in early 2006. That gave us enough money to hire four developers and finish the prototype. While those guys were doing that, Brian and I went out and talked to potential partners. We had to educate the market. A lot of people in healthcare had no idea what social networks were. There was a lot of fear around them. “You’re going to let patients talk to each other? What about the liability?” All they really knew about were the horror stories about …Next Page »

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