The online medical records space is growing fast; with Microsoft, Google and others trying their hand at products that could eventually become the go-to platform for accessing health records online. TechCrunch50 startup Glide Health, which was spun off from Transmedia, is hoping to give these tech giants a run for their money with its web, desktop and mobile apps that provide a centralized repository for patient records. Glide Health’s web and desktop apps hold patient profiles (which can be created by the patient or doctor) that contain pertinent medical information such as insurance information, family medical history, doctors, past test results, past surgeries and procedures, x-rays and more.

This browser app is based on the same synchronization engine that powers Glide’s previously launched collaboration OS software; however, this product has been specifically designed for the healthcare space. Today, Glide Health is launching an application for patients, doctors and healthcare professionals to access and manage healthcare from their desktops or mobile phones.  All the data syncs no matter where it is updated across legacy patient management systems and databases.

Via the mobile and desktop apps, doctors can manage patient records and health history as well as save any communication about patients between other doctors and professionals. Doctors can also schedule appointments from mobile phones, prescribe medications and write prescriptions directly to pharmacies from the mobile app. Doctors can submit dictations to the Glide Health platform via the mobile app, which will then be transcribed.

On the patient side, the mobile app lets users travel with their complete medical history and records wherever they go. The patients can also document and archive any communications with doctors and healthcare professionals as well as access WebMD-like information about personal health and fitness, health news, support groups, insurance policies and health facilities. The platform lets doctors and patients upload health records, transcripts, x-rays and other medical information and images.

Glide Health makes money by charging medical professional an annual fee; but the app will be available to patients for free (if their doctor uses the program). Synchronizing medical data across legacy systems is a huge challenge, especially when security is an issue but Glide Health’s Founder and CEO Donald Leka assures that the app is extremely secure and built with several security and privacy layers.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose

LZ: barriers, regulatory privacy issues comment?

AA: privacy is important, we lost sight of that-we see tremendous benefits from products we see in the market today. We provide a rights spaced environment for sharing.

LZ: going to charge providers-how to make the case to switch from previous management systems.

A: Have doctors who are investing into these platform, The selling point is the abandonment of traditional models, with a revenue share of ad revenue with doctors.

TO: I like the vision of what you like to do except for the advertising.
I have a hard time believing you have solved these problems.

A: We’ve built the platform-the selling point is universal compatibility. Signed agreements, but launched today.

KR: Doctors have to be on the platform for thus to work?

A: We are starting with doctors groups to get leverage on the platforms.

Video:

Other Coverage:
Techcrunch 50: Glide Health Geekfluence.

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If you need proof that the stream makes complex services more accessible, take a look at Glide Engage. Launched last week, Glide Engage is a stream front-end for the Glide, a Web OS which offers a suite of integrated Web Apps including docs, spreadsheets, photo and music uploading and sharing, calendar, email, Website creation and collaboration tools. Glide can be overwhelming. There is a lot there. But it has attracted its own loyal following of about one million registered users.

With Glide Engage, the various features of the Glide OS become available on an as-needed basis and gives a better entry point for the service. At first glance, Glide Engage is a micro-messaging service on steroids. You can follow (”engage” with) other people in Glide, add comments to your stream, share links and files, create discussion groups and bring different media and people into online meeting spaces. In the left-hand column you can also set up news alerts and see the latest articles being shared on Glide about those topics.

What makes Glide particularly interesting is that it is also a Twitter client. You can import your Twitter stream and read it within Engage like you can with other Web-based Twitter apps. You can Tweet out messages, but also add links to photos, documents, playable music files and videos which bring people back into Glide. Imagine if Seesmic or Tweetdeck hosted their own photos, videos, and other shared files, and had a Web productivity and communication suite as well.

The Twitter functionality is very limited at this point. You can reply to a message or retweet it, and find some information about the person whose Twitter message you are looking at. And when you send a Tweet, you get redirected to Twitter. All of this is a work in progress and will improve over time. To the extent that Glide Engage can extend its OS capabilities to Twitter, the more interesting it will become. Soon, you should be able to create Twitter groups and send out links to Glide’s collaboration spaces, which let multiple people look at photos, videos, documents, and videos in an online meeting environment.

Glide also allows you to assign rights to each file you share, so a document or photo can be shared in view-only mode or you can give others editing privileges. These privileges can be changed on a message-by-message basis. The overall user interface could still use some simplification and isn’t as zippy as other stream reader apps (and I am not sure why the logo looks like a flaming IE logo crashing into the water), but Glide Engage also has some novel features worth exploring.

Glide is built on a sophisticated syncing engine, which means that it can share all of these files on mobile phones as well. It will release an Android app for Glide Engage next week on August 18, followed by BlackBerry, and Windows. The company will do an iPhone app at some point, but since this syncing capability competes with Apple’s MobileMe, it wants to establish Glide Engage on other mobile platforms first.

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Tomorrow at noon (Update: this has been pushed to November 15), Transmedia, a New York City startup, will take a step towards bridging those online and offline worlds. It is adding a spreadsheet to its Glide service called Glide Crunch. (Good name!). So far, all of the apps on Glide—including a Word processor, presentation software, e-mail, calendar, contacts, and online photo, video, and music sharing—have been completely Web-based. But with Glide Crunch, the spreadsheet will operate as a local application on your desktop that is automatically synced to your Glide Webtop without you having to do anything special other than create a spreadsheet as you normally would.

Glide Crunch is not based on Adobe AIR or Google Gears, the two main platforms for creating offline, Web-like apps. Transmedia coded the application from scratch using C/C++. In contrast to something like Google Gears, Glide Crunch is not trying to download data into the browser. “We have left the browser,” says CEO Donald Leka. “The browser is limited. It can only hold so much data.” Google Spreadsheet, for instance, only supports 100,000 cells and up to 40 sheets, says Leka. Glide Crunch, in contrast, can support 16.7 million cells and an unlimited number of sheets in a single spreadsheet.

Glide Crunch also supports advanced formulas, pivot tables, various printing formats, and, yes, you can search within a spreadsheet. Leka is really going after Excel users with a powerful local spreadsheet that syncs automatically to the Web, where it is shareable with others. He thinks his new spreadsheet will meet the needs of 60 to 70 percent of the market. “Scientists and financial-modeling experts can continue to use Excel,” he allows. But Glide Crunch is robust enough for him to use to manage Transmedia’s P&L. “We use Glide for everything,” he says.

Glide, which is free for the first two gigabytes and $50 for 12 gigabytes, comes with all of the Web apps listed above and also works on the iPhone and other mobile devices. (it is great for showing PowerPoint slides on your iPhone, which you previously could not do). Later this month and next, Transmedia will be rolling out local versions of its other productivity apps, starting with Glide Write, then e-mail, and Glide Presenter. Glide may not have the user numbers of Google Docs (Glide has about 500,000 total users, 14 percent actually pay), but it is pushing the envelope in terms of functionality and in terns of fusing the Web and the desktop. The company’s revenues are closing in on $4 million a year, with no VC money. The $6.5 million it has raised has all been angel investors, including several ex-Wall Street analysts like Harold Vogel.

Here are some of the advanced functions and features Glide Crunch will support:

Function
Sin – sine function
Cos – cosine function
Tan – tangent function
Asin – arc sine function
Acos – arc cosine function
Atan – arc tangent function
Sinh – hyperbolic sine function
Cosh – hyperbolic cosine
Tanh – hyperbolic tangent function
Asinh – hyperbolic arc sine function
Acosh – hyperbolic arc tangent function
Atanh – hyperbolic arc tangent function
log2 – logarithm to the base 2
log10 – logarithm to the base 10
log – logarithm to the base 10
ln – logarithm to base e (2.71828…)
exp – e raised to the power of x
sqrt – square root of a value
sign – sign function -1 if x<0; 1 if x>0
rint – round to nearest integer
abs – absolute value
if – if … then … else …
min – min of all arguments
max – max of all arguments
sum – sum of all arguments
avg – mean value of all arguments
and more…

Operator
and logical and
or logical or
x or logical xor
< = less or equal
>= greater or equal
!= not equal
== Equal
> greater than
< less than
+ Addition
- Subtraction
* Multiplication
/ Division
^ raise x to the power of y
! factorial

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