Who is working in the healthcare sector with their startup? What do you enjoy the most working in this sector? What was your driving motivation for starting your company in healthcare?
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I have quite a few product ideas - mainly about EHR systems and data fragmentation / data exchange. I've shared those ideas with friends in the healthcare industry (both physicians and people working for insurance companies). While they all agreed that this particular area is in desperate need of fixing and the product I suggested would help with alleviating some of the pain they also said that for the principal stakeholders there's little to no motivation to improve or modernize processes.
The industry is driven by very complex, intertwined, often political incentives and ulterior motives. The patients' actual well-being seems to be quite low on the priority list.
Physicians also often seem to be quite averse towards technology and often don't trust people who aren't doctors themselves (so getting a doctor onboard your healthcare startup team might be a good idea if you haven't done so already ...). I know specialists who own ridiculously expensive CAT scanners, MRI scanners and whatnot yet still insist on sending the images created by these expensive machines via mail (the traditional one, not the electronic variety - with expectable results: Data occasionally gets lost, data is fragmented across various providers, scans have to be done again because the image from 3 months ago can't be found anymore ...).
Sales is another problem. If you ever thought enterprise sales processes were long and complex those are eclipsed by enterprise sales processes in the healthcare industry. If you want to market a new product you have to navigate a Byzantine labyrinth of certification processes apparently carefully put in place by lobbying incumbents in order to keep upstarts out of the market. When marketing a new healthcare product targeted at healthcare providers you're looking at years - not months - of painstaking and costly lobbying. I'm not sure how any startup could afford this.
I don't want to sound negative. I'd love to see more improvements in this space but I'm afraid that - other than consumer products such as quantified self apps - the situation looks pretty bleak. If you have any suggestions as to how to address these issues and change the industry for the better, please drop me a note.
The next wave - usable, actionable data. Companies, academia, and hospitals are thirsty to use the vast amount of data already generated sitting with no further use to help patients. If a good enough interface or software is developed, doctors will likely be ok to easily learn tech to take advantage of the benefits of using data for their practice (it is always a cost-benefit analysis). Actionable and understandable heath data differs to other industries in this manner:
1. Academia: Collects and uses data for research purposes, not yet applied (Ex: DNA, 23andme)
2. EHRs: It is just data collection and organization. Better interfaces or features are not likely to improve healthcare substantially.
3. The consumer wearables market: Data collected is often superficial and catered to healthy individuals, which does not help much in actually improving or providing actionable data to either consumers or physicians alike.
The missing gap is a service between engineering and medicine (ex: biomedical engineers) that will help physicians handle care more effectively using data. The closest companies in this category are Flatiron Health or maybe Theranos, but they are both just startups still proving themselves.
