Health Care Innovation – What’s Next?

 

Next: The Future Just Happened

 

Title of  2001 book, by Michael Lewis, Norton

 

If you’re wondering what comes next in the health care innovation revolution,  look at Silicone Valley.  That’s where Internet entrepreneurs thrive,  that’s where entrpreneurs and venture capitalists interconnect and feed off each other, and that’s where the Venture Capital industry is concentrated.

 

Read the following from Kaiser Health News, and you’ll begin to see the picture.

 

Health Care Innovations In Technology Spotlight

May 21, 2013

“A Silicon Valley conference offers insights regarding what's working and what is coming next for health care innovation. Meanwhile, some startup companies are aiming technology advances at medication adherence.

The Washington Post: Health-Care Training And Data Storage Innovations Featured At Silicon Valley Conference.

This year's HealthBeat conference continues through Tuesday in San Francisco, with health technology innovators gathering to offer their take on what's challenging, what's working and what's next in innovation for the health care industry.

The Wall Street Journal:”Forget To Take Medicine? These Pills Will Tell Your Doctor”
Startup companies are coming up with new technologies aimed at getting people to take medicine only as directed. Taking medication haphazardly—skipping doses, lapsing between refills or taking pills beyond their expiration date—has been linked to health complications and hundreds of millions of wasted dollars for insurers and hospitals ”

What’s next?

You can bet on this:   It will involve companies receiving  venture capital money.  It  will be some new mobile device  application of the Internet.   It will connect doctors with doctors, or patients with doctors , It will proclaimed at an “information  technology”  that facilitates care, speeds access, educates professionals and patients,  networks like-minded people, lowers cost,  monitors health and disease. The latter may feature “wearable tech,” mobile devices worn as clothing to record your vital signs and other body functions

Up and Comers

This year’s up and comers include:

·         Doximity is an online professional network for U.S. physicians. Launched in October 2010, Doximity has over 140,000 verified physician members as of March 2013.Doximity offers a searchable directory of 700,000 U.S. physicians as well as HIPAA-secure case collaboration and physician-to-physician messaging. Doximity has received $10.8 million in venture capital funding from Emergence Capital Partners and Interwest Partners.

·         HealthTap is an Interactive Health ^[company, whose  stated mission is to provide personalized health information and to connect patients and doctors worldwide around the most basic interaction in health care: the medical question and answer.The company received Series A funding from The Mayfield Fund, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Mohr Davidow Ventures, In April 2011, HealthTap launched a public Beta product focused on providing health information related to pregnancy and infant care. In September 2011, HealthTap expanded its service to encompass all areas of health. The main service offered by HealthTap is the ability to ask health questions, online and via mobile devices, to a network of U.S.-licensed physicians for free.There are currently a number of versions of HealthTap available across several platforms and devices, including a version for the web along with applications for iPhone, iPad and Android.

·         IBM’s Watson Computer (no venture capital involved).  Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!. In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings Watson received the first prize of $1 million. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM Watson’s business chief  says 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

Tweet:  Health care innovations often originate in Silicon Valley, where Internet entrepreneurs and Venture capitalists live and interact.