Phila. medical app firm takes a Vegas visit

Brendan McCorkle

, chief executive of Philadelphia-based medical-software app developer

CloudMine

, flew to Las Vegas because that's where his firm's clients and prospects are congregating.

He was bound for HIMSS, the conclave of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, which McCorkle calls "the biggest health-care technology meeting of the year," collecting hospitals, drugmakers, drug researchers, cost accountants, and the mobile health-application developers who increasingly monitor our vital signs and medical therapies for all those groups.

CloudMine, which began life as a health-care app builder with backing from Philadelphia's DreamIt Health and angel investors, picked the Vegas show to roll out its Connected Health Cloud, a software-building system designed to take some of the repetitive drudgery out of building apps for privacy-conscious, federally regulated, smartphone- and Fitbit-friendly medical uses.

"There is a void in the health-care technology of applications that provide meaningful and real-time, contextual patient information," Neil Gomes, vice president for technology innovation and consumer experience at Thomas Jefferson University and its hospital system, said in a statement.

CloudMine's Connected Health Cloud "fills this void" by giving Jefferson's growing staff of programmers ready-made, reusable software to protect data and comply with the law, so they can focus on digging up "deep patient insights," Gomes added.

Besides teaching hospitals such as Jeff, CloudMine counts among its clients drugmakers (Mylan Specialty, Endo Pharmaceuticals) and the Philadelphia-based drugmakers' advertising and support service Digitas Health, as well as start-ups such as University City-based mobile genetic-testing device maker Biomeme.

CloudMine has helped drugmakers mine complex patient analytics, says Brendan Gallagher, who oversees mobile, social media, and other "Connected Health" products for Digitas Health. "Communicating with patients, caregivers, and physicians requires a lot of trust," Gallagher says. "Privacy, security, and compliance are critical. We don't get a second chance when it comes to that trust."

Investors include Wayne-based Safeguard Scientifics, which led a $7.25 million first-round investment in CloudMine last year.

"Philadelphia is a really good place for health-care technology," given all the teaching hospitals, drugmakers, and tech talent, McCorkle said.

CloudMine got a boost when a potential competitor, Parse, was shut by Facebook recently, MissionOG partner George Krautzel said. Another potential competitor, Firebase, was recently acquired by Google.

McCorkle says there is only so far that a one-product "middleware" company can grow. That's why CloudMine is adding new services. "Companies that became giants all build their applications out into a suite of products," he says.

Silicon Valley-based Accel-KKR, a $4 billion partnership between two of the nation's largest private investment firms, said Tuesday that it had bought out regional investors in IntegriChain, a 75-employee sale-channel-management cloud-software maker that last year moved its offices to fill a floor at 8 Penn Center in Center City, from the Princeton area.

CEO Kevin Leininger said he and his partners figured the move would improve recruiting from Philadelphia's tech community and engineering schools.

IntegriChain and Accel-KKR won't say what the buyer paid to previous investors, which include NJTC Venture Fund of Mount Laurel, Milestone Venture Partners and Cross Atlantic Partners of New York, and Redwood Pharma Ventures L.L.C. of Philadelphia.

JoeD@phillynews.com

215-854-5194 @PhillyJoeD

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