On Tuesday I had the privilege and the pleasure of serving as a judge on the health panel at the South by Southwest Accelerator. It's a great gig, getting to hear pitches from three startup companies that had been winnowed down from a field of dozens. And the companies were terrific—each is tackling an important challenge with imaginative solutions and great technology.

First up was Simplee. Simplee is positioning itself as the Mint.com of health care expenses. They've developed a service that reads through your insurance company accounts and displays your medical expenses in dashboard form—how much each family member has spent toward their annual deductible, for example.  They also explain the unexplainable—the "explanation" of benefits (EOB) statements we always get from our insurance companies, showing you what insurance covers, what you have to pay out of pocket, and why.  I'm on record (at last year’s Heath 2.0 conference) as saying that if Simplee can pull this off, co-founder Tomer Shomal should get a Nobel prize. While maybe not getting to that level of hyperbole, anyone who has regularly waded through these EOBs can relate to what I'm saying. They're starting with this basic problem of tracking and explaining expenses, but have the potential to go much further—facilitating bill payments, offering context-sensitive preventive reminders, and, as they get enough data, enabling comparison shopping for medical procedures. Best of all, you can try it today—Simplee.com.

Ginger.io then came on. As I've written before, I believe that the data we can capture about our day-to-day lives (observations of daily living) can greatly inform the care we receive and, as researchers start to mine it, it will become the source of new knowledge about what makes us healthy or sick. (Pioneer's Project HealthDesign has been focusing on this opportunity for the last couple of years and will soon have some research results to share.) Ginger.io focuses on a particular slice of this data—the data stored on our smartphones. They can capture social activity (calls, texts), geographic movement (GPS) and physical movement through accelerometers. Their twist is that they're really smart about processing the data and finding meaning in it. They're able to establish a behavioral signature and then identify any deviations from it, which can be important feedback for the user but also potentially for a clinician trying to improve a patient's health. Ginger.io is a spinoff from Sandy Pentland's lab at MIT (see his Pioneer- funded paper on reality mining) and by focusing on the smartphone data, they're avoiding the challenge of getting people to record anything—it's all passively collected. Currently, they're working through researchers and early adopter physicians.

The third and final presenter was Medify, which is working to bridge the gap between very high health information resources like WebMD and the medical literature. They have a robust natural language processing operation that is "reading" (crawling?) all the medical literature and coding it (i.e. intervention, disease, study population, conclusions and other attributes). The user can then get a summary along the lines of 15 studies on a total of 3,000 subjects, five of the studies showed that the intervention was safe and four showed that it was effective. You can then drill down and look at more detail and other dimensions like freshness of the research. I'm not doing it justice with this summary— you need to see it for yourself to get a feel for it. The key is that it takes the complexity of the literature on any given condition and/or treatment and starts to tame that complexity, which, as anyone who has gone Googling in search of deeper medical knowledge can attest, is a big deal. Like Simplee, you can use Medify today at medify.com.

Three exciting companies—each with the potential to bring great value to important challenges in health and health care in very different ways. In the end, the winner was... Ginger.io. Congrats to Anmol and Karan for the win, but also to the teams at Simplee and Medify for their creativity, ingenuity and terrific progress so far. These companies, along with seven other excellent candidates, are cause for optimism.

Calling all app developers! On March 31, ISIS, TechSoup and Health 2.0 are teaming up for a free, live hack-a-thon event in San Francisco to design apps to address youth health-related “unmentionable” activities, including dating violence, depression, sexually transmitted diseases and substance use. The event, sponsored by an RWJF grant, aims to create apps that will excite young people to share honest, real-time, private information about their taboo, embarrassing or “unmentionable” activities with researchers and program experts who work with youth.

The hack-a-thon will bring together developers, designers, innovators and entrepreneurs for rapid development of progressive concepts and prototypes to be developed by the participating teams following the event and at future hack-a-thons. ISIS and TechSoup will partner in the future development and distribution of the concepts and designs. The grand prize winner will be revealed at ISIS’ annual Sex::Tech conference and take home $1,000 cash.

Interested? Register now.

In the spirit of continuing to discover pioneering ideas, RWJF’s Chief Technology and Information Officer and Pioneer team member Steve Downs is heading to Austin for SXSW, the annual music, film, and interactive conference taking place March 9-18.  

Steve is one of the judges for the Health Technologies session in the exciting SXSW Accelerator competition where finalists will showcase incredibly cool products that just might change the way people think about their health and health care. 

Watch the Health Technologies session streaming live on March 13 at 11 a.m. CST.

Follow Steve @stephenjdowns and Pioneer @pioneerrwjf. For up to the minute coverage, follow @SXSW. 

I'm sure that the organizers of this year's mHealth Summit were more than pleased. There were more than 3,600 people in attendance, up 1,200 from last year. The exhibit floor was larger and more complex, rivaling some trade shows. There were tracks for business, research, policy and technology along with a slew of special sessions and keynotes from Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, among others. Some presentations soared with whiz-bang demos and promises of how technology will change the world; others bemoaned the complexity of interoperability, the "silo-ization" and the lack of demonstrated value.

While there is no question that mHealth is on the rise, some, including myself, are wondering if we’re heading toward a bubble of inflated expectations. As with all bubbles—dot com, housing etc.—the question isn’t whether there is significant underlying value (there is), but instead “how do we invest in the value that can be realized without buying into overinflated hype?” In the context of the ‘90s’ dot-com bubble, “How do we place our bets on Google and not on pets.com?”

The answer isn’t going to be found in the next jazzy consumer-oriented gadget, but by connecting great ideas that will help us lead happier, healthier lives over the long haul – connecting business, research, technology, and policy interests to find shared value.

I came away from the 2011 mHealth Summit optimistic in the overall potential of mHealth, but a little skeptical about the direction it seems to be heading in. Introducing multiple new and evolving health innovations is inherently complex, as is the perversity of our current health infrastructure. Yet one can’t help but notice that there are some very smart people working on developing the promise mHealth can offer to address some of our most pressing health challenges.

A central question will be how willing those from the “m” will be to ensure that the “health” is improved? And how open will the folks from “health” be in fulfilling the promise of “m” technology?

This will require us all to see value from others’ perspectives in this growing ecosystem. I’ll explore this more in my next blog post, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, take a moment to peruse RWJF’s coverage of the Summit on NewPublic Health.org, which tapped into some of the conversations, new collaborations and innovations in mobile health that might feasibly be applied to public health, and started a conversation about the potential for mobile technologies to help the public health field connect with hard-to-reach populations and bridge disparities.  Read what they learned in interviews with Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet and American Life Project about advances in mHealth, with Yvonne Hunt of the National Cancer Institute about the potential for mHealth in public health, and with Robert Kaplan, director of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Institutes of Health about the rigorous research still needed to support the field. We’d love to know what you think, so don’t forget to comment on each post or below to share your insights.

The December 5-7 mHealth Summit is approaching and I’m pleased and excited to be moderating the special session: What I Really Need from mHealth: Five Perspectives on Value.

Pioneer has been involved with multiple aspects of mHealth since very early on and has seen interest grow into what sometimes seems to me to be an “irrational exuberance,” to borrow a phrase from Alan Greenspan. I’m concerned that we’re on the way to another bubble that’s in danger of bursting with unfortunate consequences. The fact is we often don’t know what “works,” and even what “working” means. And that’s why it’s so important that we discuss the different ways value needs to be demonstrated in mHealth.

This mHealth Summit panel will talk about value from the perspectives of the individual, the provider, the payer, the regulator and the researcher. These can be different, but from time to time they converge. Rather than having a number of separate presentations, experts will engage in discussion around a hypothetic but realistic scenario of a mobile health device and what’s needed to provide enough “value” for each to adopt, approve, purchase, share, fund and embrace this as a tool for better health. It is sure to be a lively and informative discussion.

I hope that you’ll be able to join us either in person in Washington, D.C. or electronically to help us shape the dialogue.

Follow the conference discussion through #mHS11, leave a comment below, or follow me on Twitter to join in the conversation.