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...
The service transaction between a patient and physician has always been looked at closely from a billing perspective. Relatively few attempts have been made to enhance the match-making aspect of it: like which physician is best suited for the given patient? Tweaking this may have cascading effects downstream in the service experience and actual outcome. Years ago, Zocdoc impressed me with their...
I know nothing more about Careticker than what their spartan website says. But the first time I read it, something clicked. Careticker is a sort of personal (health) productivity app that lets users manage their interaction before, during and after hospital stays. I think that is a great niche. Except for hypochondriacs, no one likes hospital stays. Most of the anxiety related to a hospital stay...
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...
The personal wearable-sensor devices trickle that started with FitBit around 2008 is now starting to look like a flash flood. For every one offering that has got media love (like Basis), there are perhaps five other being incubated (like Node). It's an embryonic market, and one that is tackling complex health problems with commoditized sensor technology. Every smart inventor in a garage seems to...
Among other things in healthcare, the care transition process is also broken. For example, outpatient care usually ends with the provider summarizing for the patient their medical issue, instructions on next steps, etc. Ideally, the key takeaways are given to the patient as printed handouts, prescription instructions. But as most of us who have been a patient would know that printed medical...
The last mile problem exists everywhere. Systems may get digitized, products and services may evolve to perfection, but the last link to individual is key. Whether it is the local cable provider laying the actual copper wire to your doorstep or the company that makes a better mouse/keyboard to control any given software, the constraint brings a dose of reality to digital value propositions....
In March 2009, Apple hosted an event to introduce the iPhone OS 3.0 software. What I really found interesting back then was a prototype showcased with Lifescan (a J&J company), where they demonstrated how a user could manage her diabetes using an iPhone-accessory glucometer. It was a much needed evolutionary conceptual leap for a widely-used consumer medical device category. Turns out that...
Sleep monitoring related offerings started surfacing in the consumer market couple of years ago. More recently EASYWAKEme, another European startup, has thrown it's hat in the ring. While reviewing Zeo and aXbo last year, I found myself wondering what was the need for having a bedside clock hardware, since most of that computing could be done in a smartphone. Seems like the crop of solutions ...
Scientific and medical research has seen explosive growth in the past few decades. Since 1996, the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) has maintained PubMed, a free portal providing access to references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed now has over 21 million citations going back to 1966, and continues to add a staggering amount (about 500,000 new...