Note: I had stopped writing posts in 2017. Started again in late-2024, mostly for AI.
Service industries like consulting, hospitality, restaurants or the local car mechanic, are judged on experience. Healthcare folks would like to think that it's all about outcomes but no one would argue that experience is just as important. And most healthcare experiences suck from a patient's point of view. Docent Health caught my attention last year in July when they raised a healthy $15M...
Virta burst on to the digital health scene recently boasting a $37M funding round and a tech-heavyweight CEO Sami Inkinen who previously co-founded Trulia, the online real-estate platform. Virta is the latest digital health star to follow the trend of what I'm now beginning to identify as tech-enabled care management. Think of it as a healthcare service delivery model where traditional care...
Most of the time, Health IT spawns artificial concepts - born as a result of relentless media hype, each reaches a precocious peak of publicity and then quickly fades away. Buzzwords like RHIO, NHIN, PHR, Chronic Disease Management, etc. were all touted as game changing at one point or other in the past. Now it's more about patient engagement, HIE, Analytics, Care Collaboration. One stands out...
One the joys of working in an opaque system is that there are endless opportunities for curators. "Handpicked", "Invite-only", "Top 0.x%" slogans carry emotional value because the perennially ill-informed consumer is guaranteed to be frustrated with the complexity and impersonal nature of the given opaque system. The national prize for opaque system has been consistently won by healthcare ever...
In the standard healthcare IT media landscape, increasingly all I find are the ruinous signs of bloated, overcomplicated conventional healthcare IT systems struggling to do everything that they claim to do. Alongside that increasingly infertile landscape are green shoots of some startups doing few things, and doing them right. I've harped in the past on scheduling being a ripe area for...