We know that policy doesn’t move fast enough and that larger healthcare providers don’t have the flexibility to be agile and develop new technology that can make an immediate impact on health care. This opens up the door for Startups to innovate and provide solutions for healthcare providers that they are not tied up trying to create the solutions themselves, instead, they can invest in solutions they believe will have quantifiable benefits to patient outcomes, disease prevention, and interoperability.
Startups are less risk averse
Startups are born out trying to come up with new solutions to disrupt different industries so they value collaboration, iteration, and technology without any of the politics large industry has to deal with. They do not have to worry about Doctors on the board worrying about technology replacing them, or the director of finance shooting down an idea because of how expensive it is or influence of other industry stakeholders. They are not bogged down by the regulations of the industry until they have a final product ready to launch and are backed by big players. The biggest thing of all is they are guided by using the technology we have today and since the iPhone has come out, Startups have taken advantage of the app landscape to provide new, innovative, and simple ways to improve our daily lives as well as keeping and taking data from old tools.
Apps are the new EHR/PHR, Fitness trackers, Behavioral therapists
We use our phones every day and most of the use interact with Apps on daily basis, so it only seems like the logical next step is to use this environment to improve our health and health care. We use our apps to stay more productive, answer emails, schedule our lives, research, communicate, video chat. With those capabilities and smart people driving change the ability to provide low-cost solutions to once the exhaustive and complicated software is boundless. Think of what we have already, with the FitBit, Apple Watch, heart rate sensors that generate numerous data points. So as we move forward the accuracy and variety of measurements that tools will be able to perform will grow tremendously. All of this and how you interact with your phone can be used to collect health data to determine, Behavioral patterns, fitness activity, and really how engaged you are in these apps. In the hospital, apps can serve to streamline workflows, round offs, charting, communications, EHR data, and recognition to make sure doctors are spending more time with you as a patient and less time trying to figure out how to enter what you just told them. So that medical errors can drastically be cut.
Innovating healthcare will take smart investing in evidence-based, clinically proven software and technology, but the possibilities of what tomorrow will look like are only to the limit of your imagination.