As someone both with a chronic disease, and who works in Health IT -- personal health tracking is something I'd very much like to see (and am working on in my spare time).<p>Part of the problem with chronic illness is that our (well, my!) dumb monkey-brains don't cope with it too well. I degraded, slowly, over the course of two years -- ending up in hospital very recently. On a day-to-day basis, over that course of time, you just don't notice you're getting worse -- what's an extra minute of cramping, introduced over the course of a month? Having a tool which tracked me, and would let me see (in a chart plotted over time) that I've crossed a line and need to seek help would probably have helped me avoid a week-long stay in hospital, and a commitment to take some (relatively) nasty drugs for the next couple of months.<p>When I got released, I went and bought a Fitbit Aria for weight-tracking (and am building something that'll query their API and expose my weight data, alongside other data I'll track via a mobile app), and it's excellent. The ease-of-use is the main thing; not needing to manually enter my weight after weighing myself means my data's always there. I'm not sure how I'll accomplish that for the other stuff I want to track, but it should be interesting figuring it out!<p>So, in short: this is an area I'm stoked to see investment in.
1) A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing. It would require them to play ball and large players, like Epic, probably won't.
2) Chronic disease management is important, but really challenging. People don't really spend their days thinking about their illness. They don't look forward to having their blood sugar assessed. Any kind of disease management program is going to require that the patient be minimally engaged, yet data still effectively collected and assessed. The only evidence of real consumer engagement in health has been with respect to personal fitness.
3) HIPAA in a box is going to require some involvement of the government. They've thrown these regulations out there with rather vague specifications as to how they would be applied to ehealth initiatives. If the government wants to enforce this, which they have begun doing, they have to provide better guidance.<p>Just a few thoughts. In general though, Rock Health has grown into a great program and anyone who is pursuing a health related startup should give it strong consideration.
"...make everyone of us a doctor..."<p>That's a very, very bad idea. Should we educate people about their medical problems in a simple and smart way? Yes. Should we delude people into thinking they are doctors? Absolutely not.<p>"IANAL" is one thing but there aren't enough asterisks in your keyboard to save you from that bottomless pit of liability.
One of their ideas is quite close to something I'm working on.<p>However, I wasn't exactly thinking about using an accelerator, and I haven't head about them. A quick search on HN doesn't give a lot of results.<p>Does anyone here has had some personal experience with them? Feel free to contact me by email if you do not want to post a reply.<p>[I'm not interested on the PR I can find with google, but by personal experiences, opinions]
wait. they want to invest in one of the most heavily regulated and friction filled business domains out there and the seed is 100k!?!?!?<p>this is a joke right, as in this is really the onion under the covers...