There are some major hurdles for these SV companies to overcome if they want any level of success in this arena. EPIC and Cerner together hold over 50% market share of EHR systems in American hospitals. Their interoperability and patient facing applications are a joke. EPIC actively makes it difficult for third parties to build on top of their system.<p>Sure, these SV companies have figured out how to build great tech at scale but transitioning an entire hospital network to a new EMR is a massive undertaking -- both technically and organizationally. Many doctors had their world rocked by the forced transition to using EMR systems and they run the other way from those claiming a novel technology will solve all of their problems.<p>There are much greater issues at play here and IMO the organizational problems within hospitals are far greater than the technical ones. To be successful hospitals will have to become tech companies. They aren't exactly the hottest place for top tech talent to end up.<p>I think the patient first approach that Apple and Samsung have been taking are likely to win out. If they can build a system that captures an individual's personal health record doctors will want that data. Hospitals will have no choice but to begin integrating that data even if it lives outside of the walls of EPIC, Cerner, et al.
Good.<p>I spent a few years working in a medical IoT startup, and the current state of the "mainstream" medical monitoring technology is not inspiring.<p>During a brainstorming meeting, I asked one of our cofounders, a physician, to tell me about some of the problems he had seen in health. Don't try and solve it, just lets talk about problems.<p>He said that <i>by far</i> one of the most common causes for re-hospitalization is congestive heart failure. It's a super common problem, <i>and</i> it's actually really easy to catch (it has strong indicators). When your heart begins to fail, depending on what side of it fails, your body will retain fluid (in the form of blood) in either your heart or your organs. Regardless, you will bloat up, and gain weight quickly.<p>So if a patient is at risk for CHF, a nurse will monitor their weight every day (or multiple times a day) and watch for spikes. If their weight spikes, a doctor will intervene in whatever way is necessary.<p>Can you imagine my frustration at hearing this? It's this massive problem with an obvious (CHEAP!! SO FUCKING CHEAP!!) solution.<p>I spend $30 on a scale from amazon immediately, and about an hour after it arrived I had it connected to an android tablet and broadcasting its readings to a webservice.<p>We never went to market with that (long story). Please, if you have the means to take something like that and scale it, do so. You could save lives. I'm currently trying. More people should be trying. This stuff is so easy, and the impact that you could have is massive.<p>Also: please call your grandparents and just talk to them. Ask them how they are feeling. Social isolation (full disclosure: this is what my current project is trying to solve) is probably the area where we as software people could have the biggest impact.
As someone who most recently worked in product at a healthcare startup I found the most difficult thing about innovation in the space is the cost of compliance/regulation.<p>When you work in an industry that is so highly regulated, and assuming you are working at a company that follows the rule of law, how do you actually "disrupt" a set of problems in this industry when there is so little wiggle room for doing things differently? Following legal guidelines in healthcare means reenforcing bad norms rather than disrupting them.<p>One of the biggest WTF moments I had when I first started was realizing that fax communication is HIPAA-compliant whereas email/SMS are not, even though in theory anyone could walk by a fax machine at any time and take medically sensitive information sent over.
Physician here. SV Tech will win because it is customer centric. Traditional Healthcare tech is enterprise centric - the precept on which they base their strategies is 'economies of scale'. People are not widgets. Economies of scale (aka corporate controlled healthcare) do not apply. As institutions grow larger, eddy currents of dominance develop - fiefdoms that compete for control, power and share of the budget. There are so many layers of middle management that the most popular complaint is that everyone is a manager. Our hospital actually has 5x as many employees as there are patients in it. I know of no other industry where this skewed statistic exists. Can you imagine an airliner with twice as many stewards as passengers? Perhaps the legal profession is an exception, where you have so many bodies tending to a trial. In healthcare, patients are lost in this machine and the cacophony of voices speaking to them is a disservice. Perhaps tho in this era of the consumer age, some patients conflate quantity with quality and might actually feel 'more is better'. If healthcare is delivered through a watch on your wrist instead of an army of servants, the layperson might be able to focus his/her understanding on the single voice their device has.<p>The other secret weapon of SV is that it promises to get people to open up their pocketbooks to actually pay for their own healthcare. Government will adore them for that. If you think that will never happen, just stop and think for a minute. People shell out hundreds of dollars a year for the privilege of being tracked and being advertising targets. All because the mobile device caters to their impulse for 'connectedness'. Imagine if this device promised a longer life, better sex, better sleep, less disease. And it showed you with colorful cartoon graphs how much better you were every time you asked it. Forget the fact that many of these parameters are only relevant to the big picture. Statistics apply to populations and any attempt to assign characteristics from population studies to a given individual carry uncertainty. They never tell you how big the error bars are, do they? Certainly a better diet and more exercise confer health benefits. But trying to 'gamify' this data will just add a cognitive burden and most likely will lead to more popular misconceptions and misinterpretations. Or perhaps it will be a new social nexus?When I am in a Starbux or Panera, there are always a few conversations my ears cannot avoid as people share their health problems over a sandwich and a coffee. And I cannot help laughing at how ironic the whole HIPAA thing is.<p>Ultimately I fear that tech will foster the return of snake oil salesmen, on a massive scale. We are in a deregulation mania now and I think healthcare will soon fall under Trump's razor and he will encourage SVTech to make their move.
They are going after health care because they either ran out of customers or people to advertise to.<p>Hopefully they can make some progress but so far I don't see much.
I wonder if this will prove to be an opportunity for cities outside of SV to grab a bigger piece of tech. Nashville?<p><a href="https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2017/09/22/health-care-is-growing-quickly-in-nashville-but.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2017/09/22/health...</a>
Interesting to see the big players like Apple, Google and Amazon making significant investments in this area.<p>The big problem though still lies in the maze of regulatory bodies with which all these innovative solutions have to navigate before they even get mainstream. Small players who does not have enough financial leeway ends up burying what could be a groundbreaking solution. Of course, governments need to do their due diligence as public health is the one at stake but there needs to have a certain compromise where the end result is the good of the public and humanity.
This article is pretty devoid of content, and really only mentions that the Apple watch can be used as a constant heart monitor. Big deal, you aren't going to get much information from measuring just your heart beat and knowing next to nothing else of whats going on in the rest of your body too.<p>The real technological breakthrough will come when we have the ability to measure in real time what is going on in our various organs, such as enzyme production and transportation of molecules, but that's a long way out yet.
And it's going to throw your medical privacy out of the window in the process.<p>I suppose we'll also see some major deregulation similar to the net neutrality repeal in the healthcare industry before long.
I am a big believer that we have already discovered a safe, free, plentiful lever against some of the most high profile diseases (cancer, Alzheimer’s, some mental illnesses) out there in fasting/calorie restriction/keto.<p>I highly doubt it will ever become mainstream for the simple reason that no healthcare or big tech co can make money from telling people to eat in a way that induces ketosis.<p>Science of Fasting doc:
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fasting-Sylvie-Gilman/dp/B075848T5T" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fasting-Sylvie-Gilman/dp/B075...</a>
It's unfortunate that people think "tech" is what health care needs, when in reality society would benefit tremendously if something as simple as a 5-10 day water fast became mainstream [again], as it used to be, before modern medicine took over.