Hey guys,<p>I'm a longtime reader of hacker news. I'm looking for a technical cofounder. I know this sounds bad but hear me out. I think a little bit about my background would be helpful. I graduated from UCSD in 2005 with my degree in computer science. I worked for a couple of years, mainly with PHP, before I applied to medical school. Currently I am a first-year resident at UCSF Fresno. After the year is over I will be heading to USC to start my radiology residency. I still try to code every once in a while and I know some Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript.<p>With all the time I've spent in the health care system, I seen a lot of opportunities to start a company that would solve some of the problems I've seen in the hospital.<p>Many of the problems in healthcare involve two systems that need data from each other. For example there is a machine that measures pulmonary function and will generate a PDF report. This PDF report has values that need to be entered into an EMR/EHR. This is time-consuming for some of the doctors and doctors should not be wasting their time with data entry. There is a stack of these reports and 10 minutes are spent entering in data and another one minute is spent interpreting the data.<p>I'm fairly certain I can write a program to do this and make an extra $500 per month from the hospital but starting a company around this idea seems to be a better option. With that being said, I'd rather have an engineer handle the coding and I would handle talking to hospitals and making sales. Many hospitals in the area need this sort of work done and I know we could generate income in this sector.<p>I'm looking specifically for somebody in California who can spend 2-3 hours per day coding on these projects. This person would probably be working on their own projects in their spare time. If this sounds like you please drop me an email at mtran115@gmail.com and we can talk some more.
My unsolicited advice: rather than being "fairly certain" that you can make $500/mo with your idea so that you would prefer to start a company first, I suggest that you reverse the order of operations.<p>First, be certain that you can make $500/mo by building it yourself and get the hospital paying $500/mo.<p>Then, if the opportunity looks good, start organizing (aka building an organization, a company) around that.<p>You'll short circuit a lot of pain that way.
I've done some work in clinical research and I can tell you that you might need a legal cofounder more than a technical one! I had ways to automate dozens of employees jobs away just by integrating data systems, but in the eyes of the hospital it was too risky. They didn't want to violate HIPPA. I wrote a little thing about it for The Scientist: <a href="http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35249/title/Researchers--Hire-Hackers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/35249/...</a><p>I'd love to talk to you more about this because these are problems I'd love to see solved. I think its a real up hill battle though.
As a physician of 15 years in internal medicine all I have to say is residency must have become ridiculously easy if you have time to start a company.. For me, 100 hours a week made that impossible so I waited until I was done. Your idea is an old one. It's been deliberated and contemplated. You forget that you're writing code that is essentially a medical tool that potentially affects peoples lives. You will need massive insurance, and lots of regulations to contend with. You will take on all liability with regard to patient outcomes. In the end, it will cost you 10x more than 500 a week. I don't even consider healthcare with my coding projects.
Two pieces of advice from a very drunk technologist.<p>One, never approach a community that lives and breathes startups using words such as "fairly certain," and "try." They have no power here.<p>Two, start the company, make a respectable business plan, and then whore yourself out. No one is going to be interested in a joint venture with a few paragraphs of information to go on.<p>You don't have to be perfect, nor do you even need a full roadmap of ideas or plans, but people need to see that you're willing to put effort into it. No one makes a successful startup, especially in the medical field without considerable research and effort. If people don't see that you're willing to put in the time, they'll never get behind you.
That's not something I would call "disruptive". That's an improvement over what currently exists, but it's trivial and doesn't disrupt anything in any way.
I would be willing to bet the hospital you work at is paying several million a year for their EMR and all sorts of smaller contracts that probably nobody knows about. One of those contracts probably supports the integration you are looking to do and has not been configured yet because it has not went high up enough the food chain. I think you are better off asking contacting the IT department of the hospital and have them log a ticket to the EMR provider (probably Cerner or Epic) and have them look at it before getting too invested.
Founder of a SF-based healthcare-related startup here. Emailed you. I'm not looking for a job but happy to help how I can.<p>EDIT: To anyone in the Bay Area (or really anywhere) also thinking about joining this industry, feel free to reach out to me too. My cofounders and I have learned way more than we want to know over the past few months about the healthcare industry + the startup side of things and are happy to pass on our knowledge.
Is the time spent entering in data considered billable? If yes, then I doubt the hospital will be interested. If no, then you may be onto something.I was in a presentation not long ago at my former employer and we were being pitched a pretty cool piece of software that would probably have saved me a couple of weeks of tedious interface building. I pointed out to the VP how much time I would save. He said that we bill by the hour. I don't work there anymore.
Hi, I'm a 3 time healthcare entrepreneur (10 years) who has been down this path, and many like it, several times already. The problem you are describing is well known and in your hospital's IT queue, just so low on the list to be invisible.<p>As others have rightly pointed out, the technical issues are perhaps 10% of the problem. On top of that, because each EHR is configured so differently, your solution will be a consulting effort not a product (read: expensive)<p>My suggestion - thoroughly evaluate how difficult this would be to get approval for at your hospital. If you get past this stage, talk to other hospitals. Learn what the implementation process will be at each hospital. This will likely dissuade you but, if not, you've found a niche.<p>The reality is that this is not an IT problem but a process flow problem. Somebody with a lower pay grade should be entering this data, say an MA or a 1st year resident, until the IT team can prioritize this known issue.
Just to add to what you are saying, it isn't just docs wasting time with systems that don't play nicely. Radiology is a hotbed of IT chaos with dozens (zero exaggeration) of systems that just do not work properly. Cardiac CT reports, MRI Spectro, CT dose reports, RIS systems and the PACS (there are about 20 data points on this one alone) etc. Basically anything that has any post processing done is also displayed horribly by viewing systems. Comparing what I see when making reformatted images to what some poor doc gets when I send him the reformats is very depressing. We have a radiologist who codes - he is mostly mortal unfortunately and has a finite amount of time is his day. Despite this he has made some amazing improvements in crap radiology workflow practices.
Forget coding for health care. MD and coder for 15 years. You will make 10x the profit if you avoid the regulations and liability of health care software.. In addition, I'm not sure you have any idea how little few time you're about to have.
Sorry to piggy back on your post. But Indian Medical Doc here pursuing Orthopedic Surgery Residency who also codes in Python, Django, Frontend and Excellent in UI/UX is also looking for some help !! If there is anyone in the audience who is a full stack python guy located in India or USA and can help me disrupt Health care Kindly get in touch.<p>Have lived and worked in some of the finest hospitals in US (viz: Ny Presbyterian and KCH brooklyn) and also in rural India this has given me a very good understanding of health problems that can be fixed with technology. Have already done some good amount of work and things are already in place. Need someone who can complement me with the right skills.<p>HealthEnclave.com<p>Am looking for some one good with-<p>- Django / Python / Flask
- Tastypie / Django Rest framework
- Fronend Desing (HTML5, CSS3, Jquery, Bootstrap, Less)
- MongoDb / PosgreSQL<p>additional skills: (not necessary but it would be great if you have 'em)<p>- Objective C (iOs dev) And JAVA for (Android)
- Some understanding of ML , Data analytics
- Electronics prototyping with Arduino<p>I am familiar with and have some amount of practical working knowledge of all the above listed technologies.<p>Thanks Asingh [at] HealthEnclave [dot] com
> Many of the problems in healthcare involve two systems that need data from each other.<p>This. From my limited experience, even with all the systems able to talk HL7, apparently what message segments the system sends, the message segments the system reads etc. are different from system to system. The result is entire subsystems or heavy customizations for redirection, massaging, and transformation of messages. Something to think about systems integration.<p>Another approach is to buy subsystems from as few vendors as possible (naturally subsystems from one vendor would all talk among themselves very nicely) - but that is obviously not without any repercussions.<p>I'm a pharmacist based in Singapore working in IT side of things for the pharmacy department in a public hospital here (means: pharmacy system, EMR, inpatient automated system, decision support). Still learning but would be happy to keep in touch.
I started my career making medical devices talk with PCs back in the 80s. Sounds like not much has really changed. Usually these machines have a serial protocol or in newer machines, a webserver and API that can be used to get data in a better format. You are lucky when you get good documentation. Sometimes, the vendor sells PC software as an add on and doesn't want competition.<p>This problem is probably a goldmine if a decent middleware could be written that grabs data from the device, transforms it to a standard format, and then loads it to EHR/EMR/HCM whatever software the hospital is using.
Here is one question. How will you do with all the tape? This creates a potential lawsuit point in case of failure (or even in case of blamestorming, when the software worked correctly but a scapegoat is needed). So you will need some form of insurance or regulatory approval.<p>I can create a very few extremely simple solutions in my mind that will be quite precise. You don't even need much coding. In the worst case OCR can do with simple extraction script if the PDF is too unruly. And are a weekend job. But selling it to someone will be a pain.
Any software that handles/transfers this sort of data is going to be (to the FDA) a Class II Medical Device. It seems like there would be a overwhelming amount of work for a one or even two of you :/<p><a href="http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=870&showFR=1&subpartNode=21:8.0.1.1.21.3" rel="nofollow">http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...</a>
The MDPnP group has done a lot of work on interoperability and securing interactions. I don't know how much device-specific information they make available, but some of the testing procedures could be helpful for validation:<p><a href="http://www.mdpnp.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mdpnp.org/</a>
What I understand that Disruptive process means that you are to offer inferior product for a price that matches the quality. You work hard and grow your customer base and after a while you can go after higher quality and more lucrative layers of the product market.<p>What you describe is an incremental improvement.
As a responsible hospital, I will have to ensure your software will work 99% of the time and that if anything goes wrong you'd be paying the loss. That's a dangerous field to get into.
Hi,<p><pre><code> We're based in Singapore and previously built www.MedF1.com, a B2B platform for medical supplies ordering for private clinics. We did a health report generator from some Quest Diagnostic lab results previously for clinic chain in Singapore. Dropped you an email - ryan.teo@gmail.com.
Interested in work with healthcare disruptors, we can design the software (mobile, web) and hardware (Ardiuno, Linux).
</code></pre>
Best,
Ryan