Recap of BostonDIG event series — IoT for Healthcare and Life Sciences
We hosted our IoT for Healthcare and Life Sciences event as part of the Boston DIG Meetup series in May. Given this was our first vertical-specific event, we were thrilled to see a solid attendance. We owe a big “thank you” to each of our speakers for all the preparation and generous help. The event would not have happened without their support. We would also like to thank Stanley Ventures for sponsoring the event and Foley Hoag for providing the venue.
To quickly recap, there were some recurring themes that the panelists advised to entrepreneurs working in the space. One piece of advice was to focus early on building close direct working relationships with your customers and partners to create a product with a repeatable sales process. Another area of advice was around the ROI. It is important to make the case for ROI clear in order to help clients justify paying for your product or service. In particular, there is a lot of pressure on the hospitals related to the value-based purchasing model. Some business model innovation is still required to make the ROI measurable in order to justify the purchase. We’ve seen this as a broader theme as part of BostonDIG outside of healthcare: working with large enterprises requires really understanding the ROI and path-to-implementation.
Overview of presentations
Bev Hardy — Innovation Strategy Manager, Brigham Digital Innovation Hub
Bev suggested four things for IoT startups who look to work with health systems to keep in mind:
- Evidence: Startups need to demonstrate, with clear evidence, that their solution will have a strong ROI.
- Ease of use: How will patients, providers, and IT have to deal with a new app, data, or hardware? Ideally, the new solution fits into their current workflow and requires minimal training.
- Scale: How do you manage the roll-out beyond a single-site pilot
- Security and privacy: These are “table stakes” to work with a health system.
Based on their experiences working with a lot of startups, Bev’s team has created a “Reverse Pitch”. It details some challenges of interest to the hospital leaders at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. On the right is the checklist Bev’s team uses to evaluate success; her team will especially focus on the last item on “how can I make the case for the ROI of your solution”
Andrew Johnston — Digital Innovation, Schneider Electric
- Healthcare has much higher reliability requirements for electricity than other areas which creates unique challenges.
- Schneider realizes a lot of value can be built by just knowing the physical facility itself and robust monitoring sensors. Examples: rerouting staff to reduce the time needed to look for a patient; linking patient satisfaction to a patient’s physical activities and interaction.
- Basic things like measuring voltage and current on a motor to predict failures they’re doing today and aren’t that difficult.
- What is hard, is supporting the large complex environment of a hospital and then being able to measure the actual impact on patients. That’s their big goal with the next generation of technologies.
Harry Schechter — Founder & CEO, TempAlert
- TempAlert started as temperature sensors that “just work”. That’s gotten them in the door but delivering operational efficiency is what’s kept them there.
- Interesting things happen when you have hundreds of thousands of sensors sending data every 5–15 mins. For example, a client bought $15m worth of refrigerators after asking TempAlert which model is the most efficient because their data science team can easily derive a model based on the monitored temperature data.
- There are a lot of opportunities in automating and digitizing industries that currently use manual paper processes. The real challenge is long sales cycle and meeting the demand from security perspective. Once a solution expands from pilots to large scale deployment, building APIs and integrating operationally into these organizations can be very demanding.
- “Nobody buys IoT. What clients buy is the solutions to their problems and pain points that improve the efficiency and drive ROI”.
Nitin Gujral- Director of Software Engineering, Boston Children’s Hospital
- Nitin sees the changing technology landscape in cloud computing as empowering many new solutions. Machine learning is bringing new standards to analyzing medical records and adopting app store models to digital solutions is creating more optionality.
- Making sense of the information and data is the real value. A good product should not just be a dashboard. He would like to see solutions seamlessly integrates into the existing clinical workflow instead of creating new burdens.
- Three key things he looks for in new solutions:
- ROI: Is there a clear, demonstrable business case?
- Ease-of-use: the technology should be baked into an existing process as much as possible.
- Security and Privacy: not optional for hospitals.
- Nitin is in particularly enthusiastic about voice in healthcare through IoT embedded in other platforms that open new ways for patients and care providers to engage. However a lot of these platforms are not HIPAA compliant yet, which is a missing piece for healthcare IoT.
