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...
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...
Zweena Health provides a service to collect real-world paper medical records, digitize them and enter it into a Healthvault account. That way users can have a Personal Health Record (PHR) created for them, without dealing with multiple bricks-and-mortar medical offices. I've endorsed the validity of services offering such 'last mile' value propositions before. Note MotherKnows for getting...
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...
There is no denying that the usability of current EHRs sucks. More pointedly, the data entry is really excruciating. Blogs have been devoted to the rants, articles have been written. In fact, the problem is so real that entrenched luddites have spawned a cottage industry of 'Medical Scribes' - hired hands who do nothing but take physician's narrative and punch the keys on the keyboard to get it...
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....
Consumer tools that help deal with healthcare system complexity are unquestionably needed. A recent niche has focused on dealing with healthcare bills. Simplee helps it's users track medical expenses in an friendly online dashboard. The aggregated data and management tools can help manage health care costs and perhaps be used for finding the right medical plan and services for an individual or...
A startup that helps you access and retain your medical records (to which you are entitled) from providers. Another proof of how impenetrable and complex our healthcare system is. It's a brilliant niche. MotherKnows will interact with the healthcare system (your physician, hospital, insurer, etc.) on your behalf to procure a copy of the medical record, store it, analyze it and make the...
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...