Innovation

A collection of 10  Posts

Health IoT creates huge opportunities for public health and software companies

_It was evident from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this month that there’s a great deal of interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) in general and for Health IoT in particular. Given that interest I thought I would reach out to a couple of experts to help explore the IoT landscape. Murali Kurukunda is Director of IT and Lead Architect at Medecision and Dr. _Peter L. Levin, is CEO at Amida, director of ConversaHealth, and a father of the BlueButton initiative (which he helped launch as CTO of VA)__.

As I travel the country speaking at conferences, I’ve had dozens of conversations with smart people who believe there’s a growing consensus that “patient-driven” (or consumer-driven or member-driven) healthcare spending has arrived. Consumer-driven insurance exchanges, high deductible insurance plans and copays are creating more patient payment responsibilities than ever before. So, if patient-driven healthcare spending has arrived does that mean we’re ready for digital health or healthcare insurance retail stores?

IT innovation, global medicine and frustrated medical patients drive the demand for medical travel. But telemedicine also improves patient care and the customer experience of medical travelers. Once again, we welcome medical IT entrepreneur, Agha Ahmed, Managing Partner of GHIMBA, as we explore how IT innovations help patients get high-quality healthcare outside of the USA. How do IT innovations help provide services that medical travelers can benefit from? IT helps deliver safe medical care and a pleasant trip to facilities overseas.

I chair the HealthIMPACT series of events that is held in a variety of cities throughout the year. HealthIMPACT is a no-nonsense and “No BS” local one-day event for busy health IT professionals that pretty much know what they’re doing but are looking to learn from their peers (instead of professional presenters). We don’t try to add further hype to common trends everyone’s already seen many times or explain the obvious to make ourselves look smart; we explain the implications of trends to your daily work, figure out how to operationalize innovations, and provide actionable advice so that you can do your job better.

Health IT for large systems, hospitals, and traditional physician practices is well underway. Enough so that innovators/startups, are starting to see consolidation and heavy competition. As I look around at new areas for health IT implementations, I think areas in medical travel or medical tourism (“MT”) appear to be great opportunities. A potent mix of the Internet, cloud computing and globalized medicine — when combined — should drive medical travel. I’ll be speaking at the Medical Travel and Global Healthcare Business Summit in Tampa Florida.

Last week I wrote about how federated groups of investors help de-risk innovations in the Venture Development Lifecycle (VDLC). Yesterday I elaborated on how entrepreneurs can understand risk through various funding cycles. One of the most important investors we didn’t talk about in the VDLC was the strategic investor (what I like to call the mission-driven investor) . Mission-driven strategics view risk differently and entrepreneurs should create investor journey maps to take them into account.

Much has been made of the push to better engage patients, but little has been spent on examining exactly what patients want. Despite the requirements set by the EHR Incentive Program, simply deploying a patient portal isn’t enough to engender real, sustainable engagement. Recently TechnologyAdvice surveyed 409 adult Americans about their digital health services preferences. I really like the surveys they run so I reached out to Zach Watson, the healthcare IT content manager at TechnologyAdvice, to see what health providers, entrepreneurs, and innovators could learn from the results.

I have the pleasure of meeting or speaking with many digital health, health IT, medTech, and life sciences (especially genomics and bioinformatics) startups every week. As a serial entrepreneur and angel investor myself I know how hard it is these days to get to product/market fit while working with top-notch investors who understand how to help scale a business. Last week I wrote about how strategically integrated investors help de-risk innovations and I got some great questions via e-mail about how cofounders and startups should go about seeking such investors.

Our next HealthIMPACT CIO Summit will take place next Friday, February 27th, 2015**,** at the Union League Club in New York. Our conversation kicks off in the morning with Ed Marx, SVP & CIO at Texas Health Resources and 2014 IW Healthcare CIO of the Year, and Michael Restuccia, VP & CIO at University of Pennsylvania Health System. I will be interviewing Ed and Michael together on stage and we’ll focus on how to establish a process that will embed successful innovation into the culture of an organization.

The folks from HP Matter digital magazine wanted to know where I thought digital health startups, product innovators, and venture capital investors should be pointing their attention in 2015. These are some of my technology and healthcare predictions: CMS’s request for information (RFI) on new primary care models bears innovative fruit. Interoperability will move beyond talk and into sustainable business models and real technology. The healthcare ecosystem should be able to create lasting patient benefits.

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