Ask HN: What's a an idea/feature you'd like some startup to implement?

[zxxc]

I have a quite wide software engineering experience ... even had a startup a few years ago. looking for some part-time idea to work on that can change people lives. For example, would be interesting to improve issue with GP, it's often hard to find a time and/or qualified GP Overall good and accessible medical care getting worse and worse in the last few years. Any ideas how can we improve it?

[square_usual]

The issue with doctors is a lot about supply and demand. Based on your jurisdiction, becoming a doctor requires a lot of time and approval from a governing body, which forms a bottleneck on supply. For example, in the US, the limiting factor is the number of available residency slots. That's a legal and political problem, and you cannot solve that with tech.

Of course, nobody says your technical solution has to be about increasing the number of doctors - access to healthcare can be improved by, say, helping doctors examine or treat more patients than before by automating the mundane stuff, or even some sort of miracle tech that can take care of the most common illnesses without any doctor's intervention (I'm skeptical that this would be possible without AGI).

It's definitely not the kind of thing you can fix in a solo team part time, though.

[zxxc]

I was thinking about some day to day health tracking and notifying user when he needs to seek for some treatment. For example, making photos every evening before bed, tracking daily activities, computer time, may be using some home USG device to suggest that he needs to loose some weight, or change his diet or he needs to check his blood pressure. do some pauses during his office work to stretch back or neck, or give a rest to eyes

It may increase overall life quality and reduce number of appeals to GP

Another idea was, that often when I slightly sick, it's unclear whether I need some medical help or just some advice is fine, or may be I can just lay in the bed for a day or two. It may reduce number of irrelevant calls to GP

To your point about supply, is it fine to have telemedicine calls with doctors from other countries? Not sure about prescriptions though.. also it may make medical help less available in countries with lower salaries than in US for example What's your thoughts?

[square_usual]

I think telemedicine from other countries could run into illegal territory really fast. It's not just prescriptions, to make medical advice you should be a qualified professional, and you could face liability from people who take that advice and suffer harm as a result (or even otherwise, tbh.) This also applies to the idea where you ask if you should go see a doctor or just sleep it off, as well. Imagine a case where the app tells someone to sleep a case of food poisoning out and it turns out to be a lethal mushroom or something.

As for daily health monitoring etc, I think that's a crowded space that's already in vogue right now - think Apple watch's features which remind you to stand for a minute every hour and encourage you to exercise by gamifying it. That doesn't mean you can't do anything new - just, IMO, not the most "high impact" it can be, especially when "low hanging fruit" like mental health are very, very crowded.

I think in general healthcare is a very difficult field to take on unless you have a lot of resources and are willing to work with the law (for good reason, ofc.) That doesn't mean you shouldn't try it, just that you might find something else that is higher impact and less likely to frustrate or burn you out.