Ask HN: Why aren't more people doing stuff in the healthcare space?

[Sol2Sol]

I see a lot of discussion around shiny new picture sharing apps and cutesy social networking sites but almost nothing on here about anyone doing anything related to healthcare. Healthcare spending in the US is 15.2% of GDP, roughly 2.5 trillion dollars. That is a lot of money sloshing around in just one sector of the economy. HHS under the leadership of CTO Todd Park has a treasure trove of data that they've been opening up over the last 2 years to all comers for the taking via healthdata.gov - a kind of open health data platform which in theory can be used to feed data to commercial sites and applications.

Some of the big(costly) problems in healthcare include reducing patient readmissions (Medicare is getting ready to penalize hospitals for up to 280 million dollars for high readmit rates come Oct), managing inpatient and ER utilization by being able to predict rising trends so that measures of intervention can be taken. Preventive healthcare aided by the use of mobile health monitors that automatically track and log personal health metrics is another big opportunity and will likely be the biggest revolution in healthcare in over a century if it takes hold.

I am just a little surprised there is not more discussion around here on healthcare related startups. The problems are big but so are the opportunities. I work on the analytics side for a healthcare MCO and see the challenges and issues daily.

[gingerlime]

I agree that regulation is a big barrier of entry, and building something that can save (but also risk) patients lives is not something to take lightly. Some times expert knowledge is another big obstacle.

That being said, I totally think this area is missing some clever ideas and shaking some of the old-fashioned thinking and tradition.

At kenhub (www.kenhub.com) we're trying to shake things up for anatomy training for students in the health sector. It might not be as sexy, entertaining and trendy as the next social-app, but we believe it does help in a very modest way to train the next generation of doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and paramedics. At least that's what we hope to achieve, and we're proud to be working on something like this. Even if it's not trendy, and even though we won't get bought by facebook or google.

Another nice initiative we (personally) know in this area is washabich (washabich.de), who is helping patients to better-understand their doctor's diagnosis, and at the same time train students at analyzing those... We would love to hear and collaborate with more startups in this area, and to also see them more on HN.

[janesvilleseo]

I work for a medical device startup which is located in the Midwest. This is the founders 2nd company in this space, the first one he was able to exit successfully north of +100 million. I came in right after the device got clearance from the FDA. It took 2 years from concept to product in the hands of patiets. This, from what I am told is fast. While te potential is huge, because it is a physical product it does not scale like a traditional saas company we see here on HN. There are a lot of hoops/regulations that have to be jumped through to be successful. The space is hard, but ripe for disruption. However, the biggest challenge we face is the insurance industry. It is changing fast and causing a lot of unknowns. Luckily we are a young company and can pivot fast as needed.

[ippisl]

This website is aimed at web startups. Their general way of operation is quite different from let's say medical device startups.

So people working in both types of firms are quite different. So my guess is this is just the wrong forum.

But i think medical device startups are doing fine[1].

[1]http://atpbio.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/positive-vc-investmen...

[Sol2Sol]

There are lot of technology issues to be solved in healthcare separate and apart from medical device technology. As one example Heritage Provider Network has been running a competition that will award $3 million dollars to anyone who can develop an algorithm to identify patients who will be admitted to hospital in the next year using historical claims data. Generally predictive analytics is a significant opportunity in healthcare. And as I noted in the OP, HHS has been opening up its huge data set to entrepreneurs and developers. Aetna also has an initiative in play to open up de-identified claims data to the developer community. A lot can be done in the area of developing tools around analytics & reporting and gaining not so obvious insights from claims data at both the individual and aggregate level. The bureaucracy is falling to the wayside but of course in order to accomplish anything developers need to have some understanding about the data they are working with. I have been itching to do something in the area myself but working on the analytics business side of the equation I need technical support.

[pav3l]

This is a very good question. I work at a large Canadian hospital in research environment. I see inefficiencies every day, tons of them, I'm seeing new startup opportunities every week.

For example there are lots of problems that could benefit from applications of Machine Learning and modern statistical learning theory, but people working on the problems don't have enough Math/CS background and not sure who to turn to; the quality of data analysis in Nursing/Psychiatry/Paliative care/etc areas is much inferior to, say, quality of data analysis people do in physics or finance; the widely used software (e.g. SPSS, Excel) is mostly crap and things could get done much faster and less error prone if appropriate technologies were developed. I could probably go on forever...

[dawson]

Because it's mostly not a technology problem, rather a political-bureaucratic one.

[traxtech]

I know a few startups in the healthcare space, they are just less vocal simply because their market is so much different that the typical B2C common model.

Shameless plug : I'm a co-founder of trendMD (http://www.trendmd.com), a medical search and trending engine to help practicians to keep up to date with the medical research.

[codgercoder]

Problems: 1) HIPAA? a big, scary barrier to entry for experimental firms; I imagine it to be like the FAA; the time and money it takes to get things qualified for use in the air presents an enormous barrier to small groups with good ideas.

[kgutteridge]

In the UK at least its definitely a red tape bureaucratic mess thats causing the problem. Hopefully things like http://openhealthcare.org.uk/ will break through somewhat

[hayesdaniel]

As a freelance CG artist who changes insurance providers a few times a year, if someone made a site to take care of finding doctors and making appointments I would give you my left arm.

[gingerlime]

this is in Germany, so might not help you personally, but another small startup in this field is doxter (http://www.doxter.de/)

[dholowiski]

Because it's hard and people could die. I think that scares most of us off.

[rprasad]

Plenty of people outside of the Valley are doing stuff in healthcare, especially in SoCal, Ohio/Pittsburg, DC/Baltimore, and Miami. However, most of what they do is not tech-related, so it is not covered on a tech-focuses site like HN.

Technology is not the magical solution to all of the world's problems. In many cases, and especially in healthcare, simple solutions (such as washing hands, using checklists prior to surgeries, or improving fitness levels among the general population by even a fraction of a percent) can have outsized impacts on the quality of medical care and associated costs.

>Preventive healthcare aided by the use of mobile health monitors that automatically track and log personal health metrics is another big opportunity and will likely be the biggest revolution in healthcare in over a century if it takes hold.

Not likely; we're about as close to developing automatic mobile health monitors as we are to developing Cylons. The problem seems easy in the abstract, but the specifics of something as simple as food monitoring or exercise monitoring is something that we haven't even gotten close to figuring out yet, despite hundreds of millions spent by many, many very motivated market participants.