A powerful anecdote about the ills of U.S. health care this past election season was about President-elect Barack Obama’s mother, who struggled to navigate the medical system while suffering from cancer, which eventually killed her in 1995.
I was reminded of this a few days ago when I talked to Anshul Amar, chief technology officer of Maria Health, a stealthy San Mateo, CA, startup developing a service with online tools to help patients manage their health care. We at Xconomy don’t usually write about tech firms outside of our three main coverage areas (Boston, San Diego, and Seattle), but Maria has generated sufficient buzz here in the Boston market to justify a post.
Why the buzz here in the Hub? For one, Maria was co-founded early this year by Todd Park, co-founder and former chief development officer of Watertown, MA-based health-care software firm Athenahealth (NASDAQ:[[ticker:ATHN]]). Park, a board member of Athenahealth, stepped down from his full-time post there earlier this year, not too long after the company raised $113 million in its September 2007 initial public offering. The other co-founder of Maria and the young firm’s CEO, Giovanni Colella, is a former chief executive of another notable health-care IT company, RelayHealth, based in Atlanta.
According to Maria’s cryptic Web site, the firm also has on staff former employees of Internet giant Yahoo! (NASDAQ:[[ticker:YHOO]]), but Amar declined to name names.
Maria has pretty well managed to stay off the press’s radar—other than brief mentions in recent stories primarily on Athenahealth in the Washington Times and health-care IT blog HisTalk—and Maria’s Amar told me that the firm plans to keep most details of its technology and service under wraps until sometime in 2009. Amar would not say much more on the topic than the following:
