Medtronic adds disease management to its portfolio

Medtronic wades into the business of disease management in a bid to find business outside its medical device offerings. In the meantime, a popular calorie-counting app gets $18 million in new venture capital funding.

The Wall Street Journal: Medtronic Expands Into Disease Management
The $200 million, all-cash deal puts Medtronic in the business of working with hospitals and insurers to limit the costs of treating patients with chronic diseases, such as heart failure and diabetes, and gives it a hand in the care of patients who don't need costly, high-tech implantable devices that are Medtronic's core offerings (Weaver, 8/11).

The Wall Street Journal: MyFitnessPal App Gets Venture Backing
While Weight Watchers struggles to keep its membership rolls from shrinking, its upstart challengers are beefing up. The popular health-monitoring app MyFitnessPal LLC is getting $18 million in new funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Accel Partners, a bet by the venture-capital firms that Americans are ready to take more control over monitoring their health. The investment values MyFitnessPal -- which claims 40 million users and is profitable -- at between $100 million and $120 million, a person familiar with the matter said (Ziobro, 8/12).