Mana Health has spent the past year successfully pitching its user-friendly patient portal to various healthcare constituencies in New York. Now, with the backing of an Oracle executive and a key New York non-profit, it has to find a way to turn that product into the foundation of a successful business.
The New York City-based health IT startup, just over a year old, took two big steps towards that goal this past week. First, the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), a state-funded, not-for-profit organization looking to establish a comprehensive network of electronic medical records in New York, awarded Mana a contract to build a patient portal—an online application/platform for patients and healthcare providers to view health records—accessible from any healthcare provider in the state. The contract is reportedly worth between $500,000 and $1 million. Mana will begin introducing the portal in parts of New York early next year.
Second, Reggie Bradford, Oracle’s senior VP of product development and the former chief marketing officer of WebMD, joined Mana’s board of directors and has become an investor in the company.
Mana CEO and co-founder Chris Bradley declined to specify how much Bradford has invested in the company (he referred to Bradford as the company’s “major investor”), the total amount invested in Mana since its inception in June 2012, or how much financial runway it has going forward. But the two announcements seem to give the startup—which hasn’t yet begun selling its first product—the chance to get its business off the ground.
“This is an enormous opportunity for us—from a business point of view, but also just from an ability to now contribute to the state,” Bradley says.
The son of two physicians, Bradley melded his college experience studying neuroscience, cell biology, and computer science at Rutgers University and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn in coming up with the concept for Mana.
“The impression I was left with was that life sciences, and specifically medicine, was very, very ripe with data, but not as much with making sense of it or consolidating it easily and using it easily,” he says.
So he joined up with Raj Amin, the founding CEO of New York City-based HealthiNation—a company that provides online health and wellness videos and resources to consumers—to create Mana, beginning with the idea of a patient portal in which all of a person’s medical information could be accessed online in an organized way that would be easy for patients to understand.
Efforts have been mounting over the past few years in New York to
