Digital Healthcare
For the next two years, I will be attending school in the Texas Medical Center (TMC). Driving through that area makes me feel the energy and vibrancy of healthcare innovation. Everywhere you look there are students, professors, doctors, and patients. In some form or fashion, these people are connected to the overall healthcare network at the TMC.
It is a hub of sorts, and in recent years, the TMC began to invest in the future of health through creating an accelerator. There were some startups from the last cohort that caught my attention. I’ll brush over a couple of general themes that I am seeing when watching and reading about these companies.
Workflow and Communication
Healthcare is one of those unique fields where there are so many specialties interacting with each other. Naturally, the interplay between hierarchies, sub-specialties, data scientists and patients start to develop a large system and emergent behavior starts to occur.
One of the interesting behaviors that will be disrupted and is under research is the clinical workflow and how entities communicate with one another.
A clinical workflow can be defined as a directed series of steps performed by healthcare professionals who consume, produce and transform information.
Improving communication is at the core of many of these digital health startups.
Whether it be ConsultLink’s aim to improve care coordination between the many professionals, Medifies goal to help providers send mobile notifications to the family, friends, and caregivers of their patient, or The Right Place’s objective to improve the outpatient experience, the key idea is to reduce or eliminate the friction when communicating about the current or future status about the patient.
By doing so, more time will be spent on the actual face-to-face encounter with the patient instead of the technology that can be sometimes be seen as a burden on health providers.
Overall Information Empowerment
As written here and here (and I’ll probably keep writing about it until it becomes bane), the patient will become flooded with health-related information. As that trend becomes more mainstream, the need for accessing, mining and sharing that data will become evermore pressing. There needs to be meaning behind the data.
In due time, the personal health record will become a culmination of medically-related history, genetics, risk factors, and, potentially, a glimpse of what a patient’s health future may hold.
That burden of information will definitely fall in the laps of the physicians. The doctors will need to use this large amount of data and information, combine it with their knowledge, and make an accurate diagnosis or recommendation. This is where some startups are focusing their efforts.
A couple of interesting developments include:
Medical Informatics Corp collects patient data to create actionable clinical intelligence.
Semantic MD helps healthcare providers design and develop image analysis algorithms that integrate with their products. No coding required.
There are many more that are solving different problems in this multi-faceted industry. It is very exciting to see these machine learning companies add real value to healthcare.
It was only a matter of time when one of the largest centers of medicine in the world create a start-up accelerator. In the next few years, it will be interesting to see what will come out of these innovative companies. It gives me hope that the healthcare behemoth will be augmented by these agile digital health technologies, and that the consumers (me and you) will benefit from this unprecedented growth.
