Qualcomm Life buys HealthyCircles to tie patients, caregivers and health data

Qualcomm Life, the Qualcomm subsidiary focused on wireless health, has snapped up HealthyCircles, a startup founded by a former Microsoft (sMSFT) HealthVault executive.

For the past couple of years, Qualcomm Life has helped doctors remotely monitor patients’ biometric data through its 2net platform, which provides a secure, universally-interoperable network for collecting and sharing data from connected fitness and health devices. With the acquisition of HealthyCircles, the company will enable caregivers to integrate a richer set of data and share that data among a greater set of parties.

“It’s a great way to augment what we’re doing [around] biometric data with other sources of data,” said Qualcomm Life general manager Rick Valencia. “It’s about creating the ties between patients, caregivers and family members.” The companies declined to share financial details on the deal.

HealthyCircles, which was founded by Dr. James Mault, a former executive behind Microsoft’s HealthVault, offers a software-as-a-service product for helping caregivers, patients and family members securely share information related to chronic care or outpatient care situations.

Through the HIPAA-compliant service, different doctors involved in a patient’s care, can share and view medication history, lab data and other information provided by the care team, and the patient (and his caregivers) can share self-assessment data as well as view data submitted by doctors.

As more hospitals shift to an accountable care model encouraged by the Accountable Care Act and other health reform changes, they’re increasingly becoming responsible for managing patient care outside of the hospital setting. By bringing HealthyCircles capabilities onto the 2net platform, Valencia said, they can open up more sales opportunities for the platform and enable caregivers and patients to better communicate across settings.

As part of the acquisition, Valencia said Dr. Mault has become Qualcomm Life’s Chief Medical Officer and he added that the company has doubled its headcount.