Companies that received the most funding dealt with analytics and big data. They included Flatiron Health, which raised $130 million last year to aggregate clinical and financial data about cancer cases in real time to improve patient care.
The sector that saw the most growth was telemedicine startups, which raised $285 million to provide health care diagnoses through phones, videos, text-messaging and other online tools. Such companies included Teladoc and Doctor on Demand. Telemedicine companies will be a mainstay, Rock Health predicted, as insurers work out ways to reimburse doctors for delivering care remotely.
Other growing areas included companies that aim to lower administrative costs for health insurers; and “digital therapies,” technologies designed to help people curb or control diseases.
The most well-funded areas, in order, were big-data analytics; consumer tools for buying health services or insurance; devices designed to treat a specific condition or disease; telemedicine; software that supports personalized medicine; and platforms for managing the health of large groups of people.
It was a busy year for deals. More than 95 companies were acquired for more than $20 billion in disclosed transactions in 2014.
But the year wasn’t all good news for digital-health companies that went public. The five that did so, according to Rock Health, are now trading below their highs. Castlight Health, whose Web application helps employers manage employees’ health care benefits and costs, lost nearly 75 percent of its peak value. Publicly traded digital-health companies in general performed below the S&P 500.
©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle