Massachusetts: Home to Innovative Healthcare IT Companies

During National HIT Week, we profiled some of Massachusetts' most innovative health IT companies. In this post, we recognize four companies that are at the forefront of innovation, drive meaningful change and make an impact on people's lives .

GNS Healthcare – GNS Healthcare uses data analytics to enable personalized medicine. Leveraging supercomputing and machine learning technology, the company works with varied patient data sets, analyzing genomic, proteomic, claims and observational data, to unravel what works in healthcare and for whom. Recently GNS Healthcare began working with Brigham and Women's Hospital to predict adverse drug events and hospital readmissions for patients with congestive heart failure. Follow GNS Healthcare.

Sermo – Sermo is the country's largest physician-only community, launched in Cambridge in 2006. With more than 120,000 members across the country, physicians use the Sermo site and app to discuss clinical cases, practice management woes, and the state of healthcare -- and let off steam as they would in a doctors' lounge. Pharmaceutical companies and other interested parties survey physicians on various topics. Follow Sermo on Twitter.

MeYou Health – Founded in 2009 as a subsidiary of Healthways, MeYou Health fuses gaming with well-being improvement. MeYou Health challenges people to take small, repeatable actions every day for their mind, body and spirit, like the Daily Challenge or the Monumental app, which takes you virtually to the top of monuments while you climb stairs. This engaging format and the supportive community encourage lasting change. You can follow MeYou Health here.

RunKeeper – RunKeeper is a wildly popular fitness-tracking app launched in Boston in 2008. RunKeeper users track their runs, walks, swims, and bike rides in real time with the app and monitor their progress. RunKeeper recently introduced the Health Graph API and allowed other companies to plug in data -- such as Zeo, a sleep-monitoring platform -- to create a holistic view of personal health. With more than six million users and an inspirational blog, it's a company doing big things around the globe. Follow RunKeeper.

We are proud of our state's collective innovation and ability to drive change. We believe that more healthcare IT companies will embrace the new approach to unified patient information management, so that our industry can make better decisions about patient health driven by data and best practices.

Did we highlight some of your favorite healthcare IT-related companies in Massachusetts? Do you want to challenge Massachusetts's claim as the best state for healthcare IT innovation?

About the Author

NaviNet is America's largest real-time healthcare communications network