with more choices and fewer calories, america's beverage companies are delivering. new efforts by washington pay physicians to put your medical records online, and computers in cars put silicon valley on the map in the auto industry. our reporters eric savitz of forbes on "press here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. it is surprisingly easy to predict what the next big thing will be. take something that's not online and put it online. >> that worked for netflix which put hollywood online and maim

zon. everything is online these days. >> all right. we'll take a look and see how it's going. >> reporter: except medical records. some large organizations like kaiser perfect ma then ta hospitals have made the move, but the average family doctor in private practice still keeps patient records on paper. and for good reason. the average american physician makes $120,000 a year. the move to electronic records is estimated to cost about half that. a new effort from a company called practice fusion is offering doctors an electronic health record system for free. everything from charts to appointment scheduling to online prescriptions and lab results. electronic health records have been called the next tech gold mine. >> ryan howard is ceo of practice fusion which tries to make converting a doctor's office to all digital records about as complicated as signing up for facebook.

joined by eric after vits of forbes and ray stevens. >> i read a biography of you that said you sold your house, your car, and used an insurance settlement to get this company underway and keep it solvent, and now you have, what, $36 million in funding? >> we have roughly $40 million in funding? >> from morgan -- >> our largest investor is peter teal, the founder of paypal. >> what changed in that moment when you sold your motorcycle to peter teal took an interest you in? >> so the dark days were around -- we started the company in '05. raised cash from the three f's, the friends, families and fools, and at the end of a week we were fledgling. it was the one time where i tend to think that being in a startup, being in that cycle it's like the cycle of addiction where you're in denial a lot of time. that denial serves you really well.

at the end of '08 was the one time where i could not be in denial. we were going out of business. and what happened was i had gotten into a motorcycle accident a few years earlier, the check serendipitously came and i used that to make payroll. in '09 we had a phenomenal year. the market came back. >> yeah. what is that influkion point? >> in april of '09 there was talk of this being mandatory. a guy named wally buck had some significant foresight, was able to put two and two together. this free product that served the doctors really well, plus the stimulus package coming where doctors would get paid was one plus one equals three. >> talk a little bit about how many people are using this? how many doctors have signed up? how is it getting paid for?

>> nurses, doctors, and office staff, we manage about 33 million patients right now. it's the largest and fastest growing community out there. how they use it, we use it to -- it replaces all steps of the clinical visit. when you think about you're going to the office, you call and you make an appointment. that's done in our product now. you're scheduled in our product. you're checked in with our product. when the nurse takes over and gathers your weight and your blood pressure, that is entered into the product diagnoses, entering that into our product. prescriptions, we're connected to 70,000 pharmacies. before you leave the office your prescription is filled. lab work is done, it's ordered and the lab work comes back. as a patient, you can log in and see your health history. >> what are you doing to fix the nightmare of influence claims? >> the nightmare of insurance claims, we generally -- we try to stay clear of that. what we do is the insurance piece is very, very difficult.

it's a market that's very saturated so most doctors have a claims management and billing system in place. most don't have emar in place. we play nice with them. we streamline that process with the doctor. the doctor sees more revenue. if i'm a doctor in california and i see an additional patient a day, i'll have a bump of 5% of revenue. >> how are you providing this free to a doctor? >> there's no cost or licensing, hosting, training, support to the doctor. we monitize to a number of ways. advertising and data. >> advertising to my doctors? >> absolutely. >> on the surface? >> the advertising appears within the context of the patient visit. and so -- >> what are you advertising to the doctor? >> everything from billing software, which we just mentioned, to answering services, to pharmaceutical companies obviously are very -- >> stuff that doctors would be interested in? >> exactly. it's the data that's being collected the, are you hosting it on a server in the cloud

somewhere or is it ris dent on the doctor's own computers? >> so we do host all the data in one monolithic database. that's what makes this problem very important and the way we're so long offing it very important. we hosted it in a private cloud environment. it is in a web-based environment. it's in our own private hosted cloud. >> one thing about it, electronic health -- >> sorry. >> i'll start all over again. it would seem like you need to have a single system. you want to get the whole country on one system. i don't want to have my doctor on one system, my dentist on another system. it's mecca thoughts. the value increases. >> eventually. >> can we get there? >> i think that that's my goal in life. when you say metcalf's law.

biocode efficiencies, they're things that eat, breathe and sleep. what the product does, one of the pieces and functionality i left out, let's say you have depression. you go into the visit, get diagnosed with depression, you get an antidepression. ideally you get referred to a psychiatrist in the treatment. that's where the break cage is in the system. that's where you need konts knew the at this. if that spsychiatrist isn't on the system. >> yes. as a patient you'll see 19 different doctors in a lifetime. where is your medical record? how is it shared? who owns it? there's 200,000 deaths a year because your data is not available through medical errors. that's our mission as an organization. >> you're trying to put our medical records in our hands, the consumer's hands? >> you've got it. your data today is liberated. when you think about it, i'm going to go sign up for friendster. i know my friends. they're going to migrate to my space.

you know data. health care data is different. it only resides in one place. as a patient you generally don't know what that data is. >> was your data available, what is it, csv, common assessment -- is it some -- if i'm not a competitor but i want to get involved in your data, is your data in some readable format that's not proprietary? >> much like csv, it's called ccr, continuity care record. the functionality of the product, what it does is that if you're my patient and i refer you to another doctor in the network, whether or not that doctor is using our product, whether or not that doctor is using practice fusion, that doctor can get to your records. much like i have a photo album in facebook, i share it with scott, you can still access it by signing in. even if you're not a hard core user, you can access the trusted network. >> is there some persistence with that data. i change doctors, i stopped using the doctor that's created

this record for me. does that record stay in your system forever? what happens to that information over time? >> we're going to make that the last question by the way. >> so, yes, that record would stay in our system forever unless your doctor leaves the system. as a patient you would have the ability to get to that information. >> even if the doctor leaves. >> if the doctor leaves they would have the responsibility of taking their paper charts with them. we emulate the current market. >> they're not stuck with you? >> no. >> they can get their data out. >> yes. >> up next, we get detroit the center for innovation of cars is right here in silicon valley. foreign car makers flocking to california when "press here" continues.

welcome back. what do ford and audi and volkswagen all have in common other than four wheels?

they are all hiring silicon valley engineers. >> reporter: there is, of course, a lot of technology in cars these days, from cleaner burning engines, to gps, and even entertainment centers. the new tessla, still on the drawing board, calls for an enormous digital display. cars already on the road, like this ford, are powered by microsoft and can call up weather radar or even sports scores. intel said it would like to make $100 million available to manufacturers of dij call car devices. german car maker, volkswagen, just expanded its electronics research laboratory, or erl, in the san francisco bay area, and deepened its ties withstand ford to develop the cars of the future. peter uhl is with volkswagen's laboratory in california. volkswagen, by the way, includes

lamborghini, audi, bentley, in their labs with eric savitz. when we talk about technology in the car, that can be technology in the car, the kids' dvd. technology outside the car. you're doing all of it, right? >> mainly focused on the in car electronics but we also for sure have all of the electronics, smart phones, mobile devices are somewhat connected to that also. >> inside the car can you include things like the braking that occurs when i get too close to a car ahead of me, those sorts of things? >> yeah. mainly the things that are a little bit more beyond than that. so we have a couple of topics we are working on, one is infotainment systems and everything connected to that, and the other is leadings to having an autonomous cars. these are the main topics. we have a big group that is dedicated to testing so that's

the main area. >> it strikes me that we're getting to autonomous cars inch by inch. that driver aid, lean assistance, adapted cruise control. what's it look like for the next three years? if i go buy a car, say, three years from now, how close is it to the self-driving car? >> three years is a pretty tight time frame. >> okay. >> you won't maybe have a car that's driving autonomously. >> getting closer? >> it's getting closer, yeah, that's for sure. and the things you will see is that the car will help you more with driving and in the end you will have a situation that the car will give you the opportunity to use your time in a better way if you do not want to drive. there are a couple of situations like traffic jam, it's definitely not fun driving in a traffic jam. if you could use that time doing something else which you can't do now. >> are you talking about a car

taking over in a traffic jam? >> yeah. >> what are the interim steps between now where you get in the car and, you know, you're on your own to sit back and read the paper while the car drives the car? >> you mention a situation like traffic jam. that's pretty much controllable. that's not that far away. >> until you hit the car in front of you. >> having lane assist and that's cruise control, by now if you combine that, technically theñi car would be able to do that by now. >> the thing that scares me about all these assistance packages, until you get from -- to a complete autonomy for cars, is that the driver needs to stay alert all the time and all these assistive packages make it easier for them to stop paying attention. how do you manage that? >> that's exactly one of the big points. that's the thing you have to follow. you have to either make it innovative that you do not have to pay attention, which is obviously more legal or kind of society question you have to answer after that, or you have

to make it in a way that the driver is still in the loop but that he can split his attention. >> it's not without precedent. airplanes can be set to auto pilot but the pilot still needs to sit there and watch it. >> and there are two of them. >> in my car there are two drivers as well. you have done autonomous cars in the sense that the stanford, the darpa relay, that was a volkswagen tuurig, that was -- >> it drove itself. that was five years ago. that's pretty long time ago. it did a couple of other things after that, having autonomous parking. these are kind of the spin-offs coming out of that. that's a good point. the collaboration withstand ford, that's mainly one of the reasons why we are here, because using that high level engineer some to face new technologies, that's actually the bay areas

one of the areas you can do that. >> peter, i'm curious about, i want to talk a little bit about the infotainment part of the business. there's been push-back from government agencies, others, it's great that you can do all of this stuff in the car that you can do when you're sitting at your desk but you shouldn't be. you shouldn't be working the web, shouldn't be tweeting, working and making phone calls, you should be driving your car. i wonder how you're dealing with this, on the one hand the temptation to add a lot of technology to the experience inside the car and on the other hand the concern about distracted driving. >> this is where it comes together, infotainment and driver systems. it's obvious that if you want to write e-mails and surf on the web, you need to have more assistance to make it safe driving. you can't do it on auto. you have to put it together. >> i hear the resistance in both of these guys voices. no, you shouldn't e-mail in your car. you're saying, if your car can

drive itself, why not? are we just culturally not quite ready for what you're doing in the labs? >> no, i don't think that way. you have to clarify the fact of technology a couple of other topics. you have to deal with legal situations. you have to deal with society. it's shifting now from just being a technology problem to being -- to finding solutions on these other domains too. >> but it's such a legal issue. it becomes a common sense question. >> yeah, correct. >> do you want to have the driver have the capability, even if he's doing it by voice, of having certain kinds of distractions in the car with added technology? >> so the car companies, and that's maybe the difference from smartphone companies, the car companies are deeply involved for years and years to make driving safe so all the effort we do with developing infotainment system is we check that. if it's distracting or not.

that it meets certain guidelines, they are guidelines out there by the government. we have to meet them. and we will fulfill them to make sure that the car is not distracting and that all the systems in the car are not distracting. that's something we definitely want to stick with. otherwise, it would be definitely complicated. >> it's interesting because so far in the development of auto technology's there's been the drive train and then the control technology and the infotainment system. they've been separate. that's great. as we develop entertainment systems, if that crashes, the car keeps going. now you're talking about bringing them together and i'm getting freaked out. >> it depends on the experience. the system, you can separate that. if you open up the ability to do more than what we can do by now, you have to take care of the security and the safety. >> if i have an app for my vw and it's integrated into the system and this system is

integrated into the entire drive train. >> no, that's actually not the case. >> we're not going to have viruss running on our -- >> no. no. no. >> we've got about a minute left. let me ask you as we watch ford and i think it was gm and volkswagen audi come to silicon valley, we want to encourage this. >> yeah. >> how do we become the intellectual detroit? what would you -- how would you encourage us to continue with what's happening? >> actually, the silicon valley, the perception of the silicon valley from the german perspective is that's an area where people are keen on innovations. it's famous for innovations and it's mainly in the software business. so the thing that can be done and that's actually the reason why volkswagen is investing in that area for quite a while is that we would like to encourage people in the software business to think of, okay, yeah, there is lots of software in the car.

maybe never thought about that. that's actually it. there are a lot of -- think of all intelligence, the topics that are out there now, like intelligent whatever and think of considerations that we can make the car, the infotainment system a little bit more intelligent. that's software. that can be done in the silicon valley. >> peter uhl with the volkswagen industry. >> "press here" will be back in just a minute.

welcome back to "press here" rick needle man and eric savitz of forbes. i want to talk about tech. for a second i want to talk about this book by raef needleman. he says, are you really going to talk about this book? you wrote this and on the

inscription i will read it for you. it says, scott mcgrew, 245400 physician being street, grand rapids. i was 12. that's my book. you wrote a book about "star trek." you were about 12? >> you even answered it. >> i didn't know there were answers. >> i was 12, 13 years old. i wrote this. my parents are both authors. they said, you need to get off the streets and do something over the summer. they got me a publisher and i wrote a book. >> i went to camp and you wrote a book. >> because my grades stank. this is what got me into college. >> when did this get pub brished? >> a long, long time ago. >> 1980. >> that's before i went to high school. i'm old. about -- about an 8% error rate in the answers. did you get those? >> i've got to be honest with you, it feels -- it feels so good to actually admit it to the author. sometimes i had to look up the

answers and cheat. i thought we'd geek out for a second. let's ask eric. question 244 is an easy one. is kirk married? >> is kirk married? he was married, right? he was married, wasn't he? >> no, he was not married. >> no. >> divorced? >> in which episode, raef, do you find someone smoking on the enterprise? >> that would be gary seven. >> i wrote piece of the action. >> did they ever -- >> they were in a casino. >> your credibility. >> i actually know that one. >> very good. >> yes. >> so what -- "star trek", what keyed something in for you that you loved it that much. >> there's a thread here to what i'm doing now. i've always been, you know, it's always been about technology. it changes the world, the way we think, the way we interact. of course, i wasn't thinking that when i was watching captain kirk, but i just loved it as a kid. me and my sister would sit down

to watch "star trek." we got to the point on our tiny black and white tv when we were kids where we could play name that episode within the first half a second of any show coming on. >> the episode that frightened me the most with the salt monster. >> the man trap. >> that was a pilot. >> that scared me as a little kid. >> what are you working on now? >> a sequel to this book. >> i'll cheat on that one, too. >> i write for cnet, i do a reporter's round pod cast. i do a series called startup secrets where i ask the entrepreneurs and venture funders i meet. i cover mobile and startups. i'm covering, really cool right now, what's happening, the rules of silicon valley about funding are about to be rewritten with the passage of the jobs act. >> one immediately thinks of the steve jobs act. >> it just went through the house. it will probably go through the

senate. >> what will change? >> startedups will be able to advertise for funding, which is technically illegal. they will raise money for mom and pops. crowd funding will become the law of the land. >> in exchange for equity. >> yes. >> it's loosen the rules, make it easier for startups to raise a few bucks and try to address some of the hole that -- >> regulation in a sense. >> loosens some of the regulations that apply to new companies, to ipos. there's been a dropoff in the number of ipos. dramatic dropoff in the last few years in the number of technology companies that become public and a lot of tension from the big once. if you go back to, say, you know, the first bubble years, '98, '99, there were companies going public at much lower

valuations. companies that were much less mature. it was possible to raise money in the public market that now you can only get -- >> what happened of course, sorry, that blew up and we had sarban sarbanes oxley. >> some people would argue we overcorrected very dramatically. >> some would say we didn't. but this does remove some of the barriers for a company that is -- it's very expensive to go public. massively expense such. to be a public company, all the regulations, it makes it prohibitive for a small company to go to the public markets. this changes that. >> rafe needleman wriefs about many things. check it out there. thanks for being with us. we'll be back in just a minute.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to guests peter uhl and ryan howard. san francisco chronicle did an interesting profile of ryan a couple of years ago. we' added that link. press here tv.com. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us a part of your sunday morning.