Health IT and digital health are very much in vogue right now. In fact in Q1 of 2013, roughly $495 million went into digital health deals. In a post from the Stanford Biodesign Alumni Association, Missy Krasner, a MedTech Vision panelist in 2012, shares key insights into how to navigate and succeed in this new arena.

Who Pays?: One key question yet to be answered in health IT is “who pays?” Is it providers, employers, payors, consumers, or some combination thereof? Providers can be further broken down into either acute care (hospitals and large integrated delivery networks) or ambulatory care (doctor’s offices). Missy suggests that ambulatory care is particularly ripe for health IT innovations. Ambulatory care solutions are moving downstream to lower price points in order to compete for physician dollars and are also moving to more web-based and cloud services backends. Missy points to three major changes in the ambulatory care market leading to these trends: The Accountable Care Act (ACA), EHR adoption, and physician consolidation.

Hot Trends: Looking to get into the health IT space? Consider one of these five areas that are getting the most attention right now: Patient engagement, “Big Data,” data federation, transparency tools, and mHealth.

Get Funded: Missy shares what Venture Capitalists look for in companies seeking series A financing: a minimally viable product (MVP) in use or in beta, free or paid pilots with customers, enterprise solutions (need a ripe pipeline of additional sales leads), consumer apps (need a strong distribution and marketing channel strategy), a great team that knows how to work together or may have a history with each other in previous companies, and defensible IP or an ability to execute fast, or get to market first.

– Jessica Hudak

Click here to read the full blog post from the Stanford Biodesign Alumni Association.