Health tech startup aiming for fences

Flying under the radar for much of its existence, local health tech startup hc1.com Inc. now thinks it’s ready to soar.

The company, spun out last year from Zionsville-based Bostech Corp., is on pace to generate annual revenue of $10 million by year's end. And it thinks business could triple next year.

That’s because hc1 is branching out from its focus on medical lab customers, and is now talking to radiology groups and institutional pharmacies. Signing up entire hospital systems is its ultimate goal.

Bostic

CEO Brad Bostic, who is better known for co-founding local search firm ChaCha Search Inc., said hc1’s software is key for giving doctors and health care executives the real-time data they need to meet the new demand in health care: better care at lower cost.

“You’re able to do a much better job focusing your resources,” said Bostic, 38, while drawing diagrams on a large whiteboard in his office on West 96th Street in Zionsville.

Focusing resources may well be the name of the game for health care providers in the future. They will be treating more patients as aging baby boomers require more health care and as Obamacare expands the number of non-seniors with health insurance.

At the same time, both public and private health plans are pushing health care providers into new kinds of contracts that reward them financially only when they keep patients healthier, reducing the amount of health care services they need.

The wide adoption of electronic medical record systems, spurred by incentives and penalties contained in the 2009 stimulus act, was supposed to help all health care players talk to one another. But hc1’s pitch is that few EMR systems or medical billing systems can easily produce a dashboard of key data that allows health care executives to manage their operations.

Hc1 is already being used in more than 500 health care facilities, and pulls data from more than 200 million health care transactions each year. It charges its customers a monthly fee for each person who accesses its software, which is run from cloud-based computers.

Hc1’s customers include Alere Toxicology, one of the nation’s largest operators of medical labs, and Tennessee-based HCA Inc., the nation’s largest chain of for-profit hospitals.

The company has more than 70 employees now and expects to reach 120 by the end of 2014. Bostic is optimistic in part because he bills hc1 as the first product to provide customer-relationship management specifically for health care customers. He estimates the total U.S. market for such tools at $8 billion annually.

And he thinks hc1 has a good amount of firepower to grab a bigger and bigger share of that market. The company has raised $14 million from angel investors.

“Now it’s starting to catch fire as this killer app for health care,” Bostic said.

Hc1 is working with Indianapolis-based Northwest Radiology Network to start its foray into imaging services. Northwest employs 50 physicians who read X-rays, CT scans and MRIs for 18 hospitals.

Linda Wilgus, Northwest Radiology’s chief financial officer, said she expects hc1 to give her information she needs to schedule physicians, so turnaround times on reading images don’t lengthen out, and on each physician’s speed and productivity at reading scans.

Hc1 is also setting up a system that will check all the orders Northwest Radiology receives for scans from physicians against appropriateness guidelines published by the American College of Radiology. If a doctor orders an MRI when a cheaper CT scan would work just as well, Wilgus will get a message on her computer, allowing her to call the ordering physician to see if he or she considered the lower-cost option.

Identifying unnecessary, duplicative or just overly intensive scans will help hospitals reduce their expenses for treating patients. It also could reduce Northwest Radiology’s reimbursements, but Wilgus is convinced that providing such quality-boosting and money-saving measures will be vital for Northwest Radiology to maintain the contracts it has with its many hospital partners.

“Data is going to be key to get to the changes we’re going to need to have the health system of the future,” she said.

Hc1 is able to make these data available for Wilgus by capturing all the orders and scheduling messages that Northwest Radiology’s computer systems already receive.

An ordering physician’s office alerts Northwest Radiology that it has requested a scan. Then it sends a scheduling message when it has settled on a time with the patient.

When the scan is conducted, most scanners send a message to Northwest Radiology when the scan begins and when it is finished. Finally, they send a note to tell Northwest Radiology’s physicians there is an image waiting for them to read and interpret.

The same kind of “e-prescribing” systems are already widely used in medical labs and pharmacies, which is why hc1 is targeting those companies, too. By adding long-term-care and home-health providers, Bostic thinks hc1 can produce comprehensive profiles of each patient a health system is caring for.

“All that data is just being squandered right now,” Bostic said.

Before implementing hc1’s software, Wilgus could get some data about physicians’ productivity, turnaround times and frequency of inappropriate tests. But it all came months in arrears, and it often took significant work to pull data from the many different computer systems used by various hospitals and combine it in one database.

“Today, I have to manage my practice in the rearview mirror,” Wilgus said.

Bostic is now in discussions with Florida-based Strategic Radiology Group, a national chain of radiology practices Northwest Radiology is part of, about deploying hc1 in all 16 of its practices across the country.

Another hc1.com customer is St. Vincent Seton Specialty Hospital, a subsidiary of Indianapolis-based St. Vincent Health. The long-term-care hospital worked with hc1 to develop its software, and it now uses it to track whether physicians are ordering too many lab tests.

Troy Reiff, the executive director of St. Vincent Seton, has his hc1.com dashboard set to report two things to him: any physician who is ordering more tests than his peer physicians are, and any patients whose lab results have been normal four times in a row.

If a physician is ordering more tests than is normal, Reiff said he tries to have a discussion with the doctor to understand the circumstances of his patient to see if all those tests are justified.

And if a patient’s test results are normal four times in a row, Reiff asks physicians to stop testing the patient so frequently. Reiff said it’s common for a patient to be tested frequently when he or she first arrives. But then those tests are repeated frequently—and unnecessarily—for the next several weeks while the patient recovers.

“They were being done even the day of discharge, even though they were normal four, five, six days prior to discharge,” Reiff said.

Reiff said he couldn’t get the same kind of information from St. Vincent’s other computer systems, unless he employed a team of people to pull the data, combine it into one database, then analyze it. And even then, it would be too old to affect patients currently in the hospital.

“Your EMR systems are not capable of extracting the lab system data and analyzing it like hc1.com is,” he said.•

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Get ready to see for-profit religious hospitals

I have to say it: the not-for-profit label worn by Indianapolis' hospitals is meaningless for just about everyone but the IRS.

Fact is, the executives leading those organizations are as profit-focused as any car dealer or street corner food vendor. If anything, they're coveting black ink more than ever.

That much was clear last month when St. Vincent Health, at the behest of its parent organization, St. Louis-based Ascension Health Alliance, laid off about 865 people.

St. Vincent’s cuts were just a small part of 4,700 jobs eliminated nationwide by Ascension, according to an executive who was laid off at St. Mary Medical Center, an Ascension subsidiary in Evansville.

Ascension, the nation’s largest chain of Catholic hospitals, wants to boost profits from its operations substantially. Any business would.

But Ascension faces extra pressure to focus on cutting costs, because both government health plans and private health insurers are holding the line on reimbursement rates. And Ascension, like all hospitals, needs to keep its profit margins healthy to satisfy its public bondholders.

Ascension’s hospital operations turned a profit of 3.7 percent in its most recently reported financial year, up from 2.7 percent the year before. That’s good but not great for a hospital system.

The 4,700 jobs eliminated represent just 4 percent of Ascension’s total work force of 122,000 people, but the cuts still could give a sizable boost to Ascension’s profit margin. A 4 percent cut to salaries and benefits would have saved Ascension about $325 million in its most recently reported fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2012. Its profit margin would have jumped up to 5.7 percent.

Profit-focused management is hardly unique to St. Vincent and Ascension. Indiana University Health, for example, tried to boost its profit margins over the past decade with aggressive building and marketing campaigns. It even, for a time, started new hospitals using for-profit structures and investment capital from physicians.

Some find this business-minded approach to medicine morally reprehensible. Hospitals, however, see themselves as using business practices to help them advance a worthwhile cause—human health. In this view, profits are not the purpose of the organization, but rather a necessary ingredient for sustaining that mission over the long-term.

“No margin, no mission” is the phrase often used by health care executives, particularly those leading religious, not-for-profit hospitals.

With exactly this mindset, Ascension launched in 2011 the Ascension Health Care Network as a for-profit joint venture with Oak Hill Capital Partners, a Wall Street private equity firm. The network’s goal is to use some of Oak Hill’s $30 billion asset chest to acquire struggling Catholic hospitals in order to keep them alive.

“Of course, the reason this issue is on the table at all is that there are Catholic hospitals across the country that are facing the question of whether they are going to be able to continue to survive, to thrive in the long run,” explained Leo Brideau, CEO of the Ascension Health Care Network. He noted that “in many cases we’re talking about whether they will even survive over the next five years or so.”

Brideau made those comments during a March 2012 conference at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. The proceedings of that conference were published this year as a book titled, “Is a For-Profit Structure a Viable Alternative for Catholic Health Care Ministry?” You can read the book here.

Ascension’s executives clearly think they can meld their Catholic mission and a for-profit status.

“The point is, ‘for-profit’ describes our tax status; it doesn’t describe our purpose. Our purpose is continuing the healing ministry of Jesus—that is our purpose,” Brideau said. “And so, whether not-for-profit or for-profit, we use our capital in very much the same ways; but in either case we have to provide a return on investment to our bondholders and to our shareholders.”

One thing Brideau did not address in his speech was whether a for-profit structure would affect the amount of free care provided. A 2006 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, using data from Indiana and four other states, not-for-profit hospitals provide a tick more uncompensated care than their for-profit peers—4.7 percent of their operating expenses, compared with 4.2 percent at for-profit hospitals.

That said, I suspect we'll see other not-for-profit hospitals, perhaps even some here in Indianapolis, turn to a for-profit strategy to deal with financial pressures. Sensing exactly that kind of trend, the Catholic Health Association passed a rule in 2011 that allowed Catholic hospitals to keep their membership after converting to a for-profit organization, pending a study of the issue by a task force. And that's certainly what Ascension's Brideau expects.

“I believe that there is no question that for-profit tax status can be entirely consistent with maintaining the Catholic health ministry," he said. "In fact, I would argue that in today’s world it is necessary, beyond simply being appropriate.”

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Franciscan doubles down on accountable care

Franciscan St. Francis Health earned a $6.6 million bonus from the Medicare program for its success at keeping central Indiana patients out of the hospital and the emergency room. So the hospital system will expand its participation in so-called accountable care programs to all its Indiana territories.

That performance ranked Franciscan in the top five out of 32 groups of health care providers participating in the Medicare Pioneer ACO program—one of the Obama administration’s earliest tests of a key Affordable Care Act strategy for controlling future increases in health care costs.

Franciscan actually reduced spending—a rarity in health care—on 20,000 Medicare patients in 2012 compared with the cost of care those same patients received annually in the three previous years.

The federal Medicare program, the largest health plan for seniors, projected it would spend $230 million last year to care for the 20,000 patients, based on their health status and claims experience. That number represented a 4.8-percent increase over the average annual amount Medicare had paid to care for those same patients in 2009 through 2011.

Franciscan’s efforts to keep the patients healthier and out of the hospital led to spending $216.7 million on them—a 6-percent reduction from Medicare’s projected amount. The federal Medicare program will pay Franciscan a bonus of $6.6 million—its half of the $13.3 million Franciscan saved.

Franciscan executive Jay Brehm said accountable care is a key strategy for Franciscan’s future success.

“There is a lot of support throughout the organization,” said Brehm, senior vice president of strategic planning and business development for Franciscan Alliance, the Mishawaka-based parent Franciscan St. Francis Health. “We think it helps Franciscan improve its service offerings and value to the payers and the beneficiaries that seek our services.”

The overall results of the Pioneer ACO were mixed. Franciscan was one of just 13 participants that saved money compared with their expected spending. Four spent more than their target and 15 spent the same. Nine organizations left the program after the first year.

But combined, the 32 organizations spent $87.6 million less than projected by Medicare’s actuaries. In order to be eligible for bonus payments, they also had to report quality data in 15 areas.

Among all the Pioneer ACO participants, spending still went up—0.3 percent compared with the average over the previous three years. But that was less than the 0.8-percent increase in the cost of care for similar Medicare beneficiaries, according to an analysis by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the Medicare program.

Franciscan’s care actually cost Medicare less than it had been paying—about $2.8 million less than the annual average in the three prior years. That represented a 1.3-percent spending reduction.

Franciscan achieved savings by reducing the number of patients coming back to the hospital a second time for the same condition, reducing patients’ use of the emergency room, and by working with long-term care providers to shorten patients stays by improving their health faster.

Franciscan identified about 2,000 patients it deemed in need of in-home visits and other interventions from its team of complex care nurses and social workers.

Franciscan identified those patients by running their past Medicare claims through predictive modeling software, which essentially identified patients suffering from or were at high-risk of developing three chronic diseases: diabetes, congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—or in many cases, all three.

“Most of those people were hitting the ER a lot. Most of those people had readmissions. Most of those people had 15 to 20 medications,” said Jenny Westfall, regional vice president for Franciscan ACO.

These high-need patients also had transportation and income issues that frequently prevented them from getting the care they needed.

“We’ve used a lot of social workers to help these patients," Westfall said. "They don’t have a lot of support at home. Oftentimes, they have no transportation. They don’t have the money to buy the prescriptions that we prescribe for them when we send them home. So we just did a lot of hand-holding.”

Franciscan also identified patients in need by surveying the roughly 700 physicians who are part of its Pioneer ACO organization. Those doctors will get a chunk of the $6.6 million bonus, Brehm said, but the size of their take has yet to be decided by Franciscan executives.

The rest of the bonus, he said, would be reinvested in Franciscan’s in-house systems and personnel that support its ACO programs.

In addition to the 2,000 patients who received home visits and coaching, Franciscan placed telephone calls to about 75 percent of its 20,000 patients. And all patients received written materials about the Franciscan ACO, which included educational materials about various health conditions.

Franciscan is trying to keep those efforts going this year. It also has to step up its game on its quality metrics. To qualify for another bonus, it has to hit goals set by Medicare.

But Franciscan is committed to making it work. The system plans to start two new ACOs by year end. One, in the Lafayette area, will likely include 10,000 Medicare patients. Another, in northwest Indiana, will include 10,000 to 12,000 patients.

Franciscan is also operating two other accountable care organizations. One is a partnership with Indianapolis-based physician group American Health Network. That organization includes about 28,000 Medicare patients. The other is a partnership with Union Hospital of Terre Haute, which includes about 14,000 Medicare patients.

So by year’s end, Franciscan will be serving at least 82,000 patients in its accountable care organizations.

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Expect deja vu: Obamacare won't fix health care

In this post I predict that Obamacare will be a non-event in Indiana. Two previous posts argued for why Obamacare will succeed and why it will fail. No single post should be read as my personal view on Obamacare, but rather as my best attempt to analyze the available evidence for three potential outcomes of the law.

After 10 months of acrimonious debate, 2,000 pages of legislation, 20,000 pages of regulations, and nine years before full implementation, Obamacare is going to bring us back to where we started.
Oh, it will fix a few issues along the way—and it will create some new ones.
But by and large, Obamacare will leave in place the same major problems in the health care system that existed before the law was passed—in both Indiana and across the nation.
- Costs, of both health care and health insurance, will remain high and will proceed on their faster-than-inflation march.
- Those costs will still be borne by employers and their workers, as hospital systems shift the burden of under-payment by publicly financed health insurance onto employers.
- The third-party insurance system will be permanently entrenched as the beneficiary of both a $300 billion per year tax break for employers but also now a $150 billion per year flow of subsidy payments for individuals buying in the exchanges.
- And yet, there will still be a large number of uninsured Hoosiers (and Americans).
- Significant inequities will continue to exist in the American health care system. They will not all be the same inequities as before, but they will be there.
- The gradual rise of consumerism—by exposing families to more of the costs of their care—will go on, in spite of the dislike President Obama and many health care providers have toward health savings accounts. But now, HSAs will be a reality for more Hoosiers than ever.
This is why I say Obamacare will be a “non-event.”
Obamacare requires health insurance policies purchased by employers with more than 50 workers to adhere to various new rules and pay new taxes. But there is a way to get around some of those rules and taxes, and more employers are taking advantage of it.
Rather than buying insurance from a health insurer like Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc., an employer can act as its own insurer. So it simply hires WellPoint or a third-party administrator to process its workers’ medical claims, but not to take on the financial risk of those claims.
Then an employer buys a different kind of insurance called stop-loss, when medical claims exceed $50,000 or $100,000 for one worker or a predetermined amount for the employer's entire workforce. This is called “spec and agg” coverage. It’s like a high-deductible health plan for an entire company.
Self-insurance rates were already higher in Indiana than in other states. Getting precise data is difficult, but local insurance professionals say a good rule-of-thumb estimate is two-thirds of Hoosiers with employer-sponsored health benefits get them from a self-insured employer. The rate is 58 percent nationally, according to a Rand Corp. study, and has been rising.
Dr. Ben Park, the CEO of American Health Network, expects those the rate of self-insurance among employers to shoot up to 90 percent in Indiana. That’s because the companies that offer stop-loss insurance have revamped their products to appeal to smaller and smaller employers. Some stop-loss insurers are signing up employers with as few as 10 employees, according to local benefits brokers.
If nine out of every 10 workers at Indiana employers is covered by a self-funded insurance plan, that means those employers are not bound by Obamacare’s mandates on essential health benefits. It also means they can avoid the community rating risk pool that small employers buying a health insurance will be part of. That’s an advantage for any employer with a generally younger or healthier workforce.
Also, self-funded employer and stop-loss insurers will not be subject to the new tax Obamacare will assess on actual health insurance policies sold by insurers. In Indiana, WellPoint expects such taxes to add 2.7 percent to overall premiums.
Still costs for employers are expected to rise even a bit faster than they had been for the past decade. Health care spending has moderated during the economic downturn but has hardly budged from the double-the-rate-of-inflation pace at which health care and health insurance have risen for the past 40 years.
Employers were hoping that hospital systems wouldn’t shift as many costs onto employers as they have in the past, because Obamacare’s expansion of insurance coverage would give the hospitals more paying customers.
But with Indiana not expanding its Medicaid program (so far) and with the newly insured that will flow into Obamacare’s exchanges landing in plans that pay as much as 30 percent less than employer health plans, the new patients won’t improve finances at hospitals much—if at all.
But hospitals have improved their bargaining power by scooping thousands of formerly independent physicians and by consolidating into larger chains. (This consolidation has been justified as helping produce coordinated care that saves money, but don’t hold your breath on that. Most of the organizations that have tried it so far have either not saved money and some have just given up after trying it for a eyar or two.)
So hospitals will have the clout to make cost-shifting, which averages about $1,000 per commercially insured person, continue.
With costs still rising, the number of Hoosiers paying thousands of dollars out of their own pocket each year will go up. That's because employers, trying to duck Obamacare’s 2018 “Cadillac” tax, are turning in higher numbers to high-deductible plans. Also, the majority of customers on Obamacare’s exchanges are expected to opt for low-cost bronze and silver plans—which will also come with high deductibles.

This higher exposure on health plans was not President Obama's goal when this process started back in 2009, but it’s the one of the only ways now to keep health care affordable.
Proponents of Obamacare also hoped it would end the “job lock” that now keeps workers stuck at employers with good health benefits, because the current individual markets are so unattractive. But I expect employer-provided benefits to remain the preferred option for just about everyone, and therefore, “job lock” will continue.
I see this happening because, after the employers with relatively healthy workers move to self-insure, they will steal away healthy patients that would otherwise have been factored into the risk pool for the individual markets, pushing up rates there.
That’s not to say that life won’t improve in the individual markets. It will, in quite substantial ways, as I discussed in my post predicting that Obamacare will work.
But expect Obamacare’s exchanges and individual markets to have a second-class status that Hoosiers will avoid, if they can. The exchanges will be the province of low-wage workers, who are the ones that will benefit most from Obamacare’s subsidies.
But for anyone who gets no subsidy or only a small one, health coverage in the exchanges will be expensive and will come with limited choices on doctors and hospitals.
Add to that the fact that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is unlikely to expand eligibility for the Indiana Medicaid program up above the poverty limit—as called for by Obamacare—and you get a whole lot of Hoosiers still uninsured. Based on estimates from the actuarial firm Milliman Inc., there will still be about 400,000 Hoosiers uninsured, without a Medicaid expansion. Most of those folks will actually have lower incomes than those getting subsidies for health insurance in the exchanges. But there will be no help for them.
So, as I said, there will still be huge inequities in Hoosier health care—just like there were before the drive to pass Obamacare.
“I am not the first president to take up this cause,” Obama declared in a speech about health care reform to Congress on Sept. 9, 2009, “but I am determined to be the last.”
The president's determination, unfortunately, will not be enough.

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Dow AgroSciences posts record second-quarter sales

Strong sales of new crop-protection products helped Dow AgroSciences LLC report record second-quarter revenue of nearly $1.9 billion, an increase of 10 percent from the same period a year earlier.

The Indianapolis-based maker of agricultural products, a unit of Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., said Thursday that profit totaled $290 million before accounting for interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization—down from last year’s second-quarter record of $307 million.

Sales of crop-protection products rose 12 percent, driven by large gains in Latin America, where sales of new crop-protection products grew 14 percent.
Parent Dow Chemical said its second-quarter profit more than tripled, boosted by a $2.16 billion payment related to a scrapped joint venture, and its adjusted results beat Wall Street predictions.

The company earned $2.34 billion, or $1.87 per share. That was up from $649 million, or 55 cents per share, in the same quarter of 2012. Excluding the payment from Petrochemical Industries Co. of Kuwait and other one-time items, Dow posted an adjusted profit of 64 cents per share.

Revenue was essentially flat at $14.6 billion, compared with $14.5 billion a year earlier.

Analysts, on average, expected adjusted profit of 62 cents per share on $14.5 billion in revenue, according to FactSet.

Overall sales increased 2 percent, with Latin American volume jumping 12 percent and Asia Pacific volume rising 7 percent. Overall pricing fell 2 percent.

Dow Chemical shares traded late Thursday morning at $34.92, up 53 cents each.

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Judge ends Indiana-Planned Parenthood battle

A judge on Tuesday made permanent her order barring Indiana from denying Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood clinics, ending the state's two-year legal fight.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt issued his permanent injunction after the U.S. Supreme Court in May refused to hear Indiana's appeal in the case. Days later, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued an administrative ruling siding with Planned Parenthood.

Indiana had sought to prevent Medicaid enrollees from accessing health care at clinics operated by Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky because the organization provides abortions.

Planned Parenthood, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, had argued that a 2011 Indiana law targeting the organization should be blocked because it probably conflicted with a federal Medicaid statute that protects patients' rights to make their own decisions about health care providers.

"This decision recognizes the rights and liberties of health care providers and the women they serve," said ACLU of Indiana Executive Director Jane Henegar. "We hope lawmakers will now see where federal law and the Constitution draw the line to protect individuals against government intrusion."

Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller issued a statement saying "it was important and necessary to defend the policy decision of the people's elected representatives in the Legislature that Medicaid dollars should not indirectly subsidize the payroll and overhead expenses of abortion providers. "

"If legal challenges to similar statutes in other states eventually reach the United States Supreme Court, then Indiana would have another opportunity through an amicus brief to assert this legal argument," Zoeller said.

Tuesday's ruling made permanent the judge's June 2011 preliminary injunction. It came a day after the two sides filed an agreement with the court stipulating that the state cannot violate Medicaid's "freedom of choice" provision.

The legal battle dating to May 2011 was marked by a temporary interruption in Planned Parenthood's ability to receive reimbursement for seeing Medicaid patients for routine care such as Pap smears, breast exams and pregnancy tests.

The interruption, however, led 1,600 donors in 48 states and on three continents to provide about $500,000 allowing Medicaid recipients to continue to receive at Planned Parenthood's more than 20 clinics across Indiana, said Betty Cockrum, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky.

"We've been encouraged at every step along the way, but two years is a long time, and it certainly did introduce some confusion out there for our patients," Cockrum said in a telephone interview. "That's unfortunate anytime when Indiana is seeing a lot of economic duress. We're seeing the number of Hoosiers living in poverty increase. It's a bad time for people to have confusion about their health care."

The 2011 law would have made Indiana the first to deny the organization Medicaid funds for general health services. The state argued that Medicaid funds intended to help groups such as Planned Parenthood provide general health care would indirectly subsidize abortions. Planned Parenthood performs more than 5,000 abortions each year in Indiana.

The Hyde Amendment, a 1976 provision named after the late Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., bans federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk.

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Life sciences venture capital dips again

Life sciences venture capital dips again | 2013-08-03 | Indianapolis Business Journal | IBJ.com@import url("/css/shared/default.css");/* START: Codes for all IE6+ browsers */#menu {font-size: 12px;position: absolute;z-index: 99;top: 142px;left: 0px;height: 35px;margin: 0px;padding: 0px;display: block} #menu ul.level-1 {display: inline-block;margin: 0;padding: 0;list-style: none;zoom: 100%;height: 42px;background-repeat: no-repeat;}#menu ul.level-1 div.sub-menu {position: absolute;left: -9999px;display: none;white-space: nowrap;}.new {background-color:#000099;}#menu ul.level-1 .left div.sub-menu {position: absolute;right: auto;left: -9999px;display: none;}#menu ul.level-1 .right div.sub-menu {position: absolute;left: auto;right: -9999px;display: none;}#menu ul.level-1 li.level-1-li {float: left;display: block;position: relative;padding-top: 0;height: 42px;}#menu TABLE a {font-size:12px;} #menu ul.level-1 li.left {float: left;display: block;position: relative;padding-top: 0;margin: 0;}#menu ul.level-1 li.right {float: left;display: block;position: relative;padding-top: 0;margin: 0;} #menu ul.level-1 li.level-1-li a.level-1-a {color: #FFFFFF;font-weight: bold;float: left;display: block;height: 35px;line-height: 35px;text-decoration: none;padding: 0 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;background-image: url(/images/global/nav_bg.jpg);background-repeat: repeat-x;border-right: 1px solid #2a5290;}#menu ul.level-1 li.level-1-li.hover a.level-1-a,#menu ul.level-1 li.level-1-li.active a.level-1-a{color:#69AAf1;}#menu ul.level-1 li.left a.level-1-a {float: left;display: block;height: 35px;line-height: 35px;text-decoration: none;padding: 0 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}#menu ul.level-1 li.right a.level-1-a {float: left;display: block;height: 35px;line-height: 35px;text-decoration: none;font-weight: bold;padding: 0 15px 0px 15px;border-right: 0px none;} #menu ul.level-1 li.first a.level-1-a {background-image: url(/images/global/nav_bg_left.jpg);background-repeat: no-repeat;}#menu ul.level-1 li.last a.level-1-a {background-image: url(/images/global/nav_right.jpg);background-repeat: no-repeat;background-position: top right;}#menu ul.level-2 li.first, #menu ul.level-2 li.last {background-image: none;} /* END: Codes for all IE6+ browsers */ /* START: This block of CSS is only used by post-IE6 browsers */ #menu ul.level-2 {display: inline-block;margin: 0;padding: 0;list-style: none; 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Print & Online Subscriptions   IBJ Daily & Other eNews Alerts   Trial Subscriptions   Subscription Renewals & Address Changes   Subscription Services Q & A     Life sciences venture capital dips again Venture capital surged in the first half of 2012, to $51.6 million in Indiana. But the pace of activity here fell off sharply in the second half of last year, and remained sluggish into 2013.

 

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Most Read Most E-mailed Recent Comments Snooty Fox restaurant closes after 29 years Weatherman Wright feels wronged, leaving WTHR, report says Meteorologist Buchman leaves WISH-TV, as expected FBI searches City-County Building, makes multiple arrests in Land Bank probe WTHR meteorologist leaving for position in Texas Most Read Most E-mailed Recent Comments Group eyes vacant Illinois Street building for charter school A2SO4 architectural firm reopens after temporary closure Anthem tries new 'narrow network' strategy Chrysler confirms state investment of $374 million IU, Marian set to launch wave of docs Most Read Most E-mailed Recent Comments Jake's creepy obsession with every word I type aside, Carter also makes some giant leaps of stereotype. "Disciple, are you basically saying no one is in control at IMS?" No. Mark Miles is the latest guy in charge. "Whenever something you seemingly do not like occurs, you always start blaming it on things like 'the same self interested fools that have been trying to kill the sport for thirty years.' Who is in control at IMS? I thought it was the George family." Uh, the George family OWNS the track (and ultimately the series). The day-to-day management falls to Mark Miles and his team. "Wasn't one of the whole ideas behind Tony Jr's move to control the sport was to actually control the sport? Amazing, they run the show and they still can't control it. What does that say?" It says Mark Miles is allowing himself to be unduly influenced by Euro-centric road racing enthusiasts without regard for history and the approaches that have failed multiple times. "Sorry, you can keep trying to pass the buck to 'cart' and 'champcar' owners. 17 years since the second split, 8 years of total control after the merger. The buck stops with IMS and the Georges. They allowed Junior to run it, they put Bernard in, they brought Miles as the Sports Marketing Savior. It's theirs." One hallmark of those who are militantly pro-cart and whose only frame of reference post-dates 1979 is knee-jerk defensiveness whenever anything that could even remotely be construed as a slam on two of the series that did, in actual fact, die is uttered anywhere. The issues with which we must deal today have little to do with cart. They have been dead and gone for a long time. My big problem is a giant imbalance in scheduling in favor of non-ovals. I want a true balance. I do not want another futile attempt to try and make a form of racing popular in this country that has never been accepted by the mainstream long term. As long as people like Dan Anderson are going to be allowed to purge ovals to please road racers, and owners hire formula specialists from abroad, and the venue imbalance continues being top heavy with twisties I will continue urging common sense and respect for history. It may not do any good, but someone needs to speak up. There are plenty of great choices to allow ten ovals, five natural terrain road courses and five festivals o' speed. 50/50. That makes IndyCar more unique and versatile than anything else, could be an inspired marketing theme and would attract a great cross section of casual fans. IMHO it is high time for IndyCar to quit screwing around and kowtowing to owners who have a proven history of failure where running a series is concerned. Chris was fine. He is professional and polite- but his presentation -especially during dangerous weather-was nothing special while Angie's broadcasts were engaging and very helpful. The best weather person in Indy is Chuck Loftus -love idea of flat Chuck! Welcome Angie to a great team. Thank you Chris time for something new also. Greg, your comments in regards to renters are absurd. Lumping all renters into the category of 'frat boys' is very ignorant. In addition, you do realize that people can rent houses in Broad Ripple. Why aren't you up in arms about people that decide to rent their house out? Greg, renters can and do have an interest in their communities. The younger generation (read: me) doesn't feel the need to buy a permanent location for the long-term, and we've seen what "property values" are good for. But that doesn't mean we want to live in a pit. Renters want nice furnishings, good parks, proximity to necessities, and safe neighborhoods just like homeowners do. To say that all renters are frat boys is extremely ownist of you. The ignorance on display in some of these posts is astounding! This project is absolutely justified. I would assume from the comments here that several of you rarely, if ever, actually make it to downtown and have very little clue about an urban environment. To "The Burbs": Please, stay there! Or, you might want to actually check out Georgia St. on any Friday night during the summer, whenever there is Pacers game or tournament in town... its hardly the forlorn place you make it out to be. To "Fuzzy": Nevermind..... The circle, even if not the largest public space in the city, is certainly the most high profile. In fact, Monument Circle was recently named one of the great public spaces of the entire country. Anyone who would dismiss the need for this investment is simply out of touch. 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