Which healthcare startups are you competing against?
Healthcare is such a large field that it becomes almost impractical to understand it. But its also interesting to look at because of how large it is.
To challenge this behemoth, we broke down the healthcare sector into 3 main fields based on the participants in this market. Patients, doctors, and insurance providers.
In this article, we focus on the market oriented towards helping patients in their desire to stay healthy.
We realized that in trying to maintain their health, patients are in 1 of 4 states of health maintenance(Sullivan). They are in no specific order:
- Maintaining general health: the day to day activity a person undertakes to ensure their health is on par with what it should be
- Realizing a potential health ailment: having a method for reminding themselves to have a regular doctors checkup, dentist appointment and other “medical” necessities to ensure they have no pressing or emergent issues
- Understanding an ailment: the desire for a person to understand what sort of ailment/illness they have to then proceed to get the necessary treatment for it
- Remedying the ailment: the general basic solutions a person uses to prevent the ailment from becoming worse, and hopefully for the better
Each of these are further broken down and represented below by startup’s method of solution towards the above mentioned painpoints a patient undergoes to maintain their health.
A further breakdown of the participating startups in each solution is shown below. For example, a patient who wishes to maintain their health by understanding what type of ailment they have might go through the solution of “scheduling a doctor” or going to an “online doctor” also known as telemedicine.
By looking at the distribution of startups, we realize that there is a disproportional amount of startups in the vitamin/supplements section, which attempts to solve the patients painpoint of having a method to constantly remain healthy.
This is due to the fact that many people desire to take “simple,” money oriented solutions to remain healthy. Its a “pay to be healthy” solution that requires no effort, and demonstrates how much people value their health and time.
Another big area is the medication management section. This section is large because of the ease of which it is to solve this area. Its an online platform that simply manages a person’s calendar and requires no technical or detailed knowledge aside from the barebones. This allows quick development of these solutions.
Overall, the distribution of health startups is interesting because it gives insight into how the field is developing as well as hypothesis for why they are. They also guide us in which directions to go to think of novel solutions to already existing problems.
Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/KTakatsuji
