| | | | | | | February 26 - Issue #2 Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. |
| | Startup Highlight: TacterionTacterion creates an “artificial skin” that can sense the most miniscule of movements translating physical movement into data that can be processed. The company mentions interesting MedTech applications including ulcer prevention by including the sensors in hospital beds. I’m sure you can also imagine the applications for sports, rehab, wearables, and beyond (not to mention industrial applications). As always, if you come across news, announcements, videos, or podcasts that you think everyone else would benefit from, e-mail me at scott.munro@startupdigestmail.com or tweet @R_Scott_Munro and subscribe to the digest, here. |
| | | | StartUp Health NOW! #65: The Importance of External Innovation - Dr. Nick Turkal, Aurora Health Care - YouTube www.youtube.com Dr. Nick Turka, the CEO of Aurora Health, has a great interview at the StartUp Health festival. I find an interview like this very interesting to get insights from a stakeholder that so many innovative technologies are trying to sell to. He sees his partnership with StartUp Health as a “filtering” mechanism to see companies that will actually help his patients. He sees this as important, because he feels providers then need to filter those technologies through to their patients so that patients don’t end up using untested technologies (i.e. mHealth apps without clinical end-points).I wish he had spoken a bit more about how companies can help to break through that filter without the support of an organization like StartUp Health. I recommend starting around the 13 minute 10 second mark, unless you’re curious to get Dr. Turka’s background. From that point on he talks a lot about his filtering of technologies, and his thoughts on new entrants into health care, and some advice for health care entrepreneurs. | | Caregiving Innovation Frontiers www.aarp.org AARP put out a large “Caregiving Innovation” report last month with some great insights on how technology will help the growing population of elderly individuals. The main areas of opportunity they see within this $279B are in Daily Essential Activities, Health and Safety Awareness, Care Coordination, Caregiver Quality of Life, Social Well-Being, Transition Support. Further, within that breakdown, they see the essential activities category as the largest at $53.7B by 2020, much of which will be paid out of pocket instead of being reimbursed.It is also very interesting to see exactly how expansive their definition for caregiving is, including everything from Uber to Amazon. It will be interesting to see how services for various aspects of caregiving pop up specific to the elderly population (i.e. Saferide). | | This MIT Professor Thinks Wall Street Can Fix High Health Care Costs | WIRED www.wired.com Wired had a great review of an article by MIT Professor Andrew Lo that outlines a pretty novel way to give the masses access the curative treatments that would otherwise be outside of their reach OR would current require loans (pay day, credit card, etc) with unjustly high interest rates?How? By repeating the same mistakes we made in the housing bubble in 2008, by securitizing bundled sets of health care loans (HCLs as he calls them). Sometimes it takes some outside of the box thinking to fix a nasty problem. As he notes, health care loans in themselves are not novel, but bundling risk among larger groups of patients to pay for curative drugs (as opposed to “mitigators”) is novel.I highly suggest reading the entire article by Professor Lo, which you can find here. | | BRCA Clinics Expand Further Beyond Breast Cancer www.wsj.com We are now not only getting mutation specific treatment options, we are getting whole clinics devoted to particular genetic mutations. This WSJ piece looks at a clinic in San Francisco that will treat patients with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. It still leaves me wondering whether or not such gene specific treatments (and now centers) truly help us reduce the overall cost of care, or whether they will end up adding to it over time. | | Engagement and the Patient-Provider Experience medium.com Physician collaboration is something I am particularly interested in, this medium post is a great read on the power of connecting patients with expert networks (potentially similar to CrowdMed or HealthTap). The underlying issue here: how do you incentivize physicians to participate in these knowledge sharing networks. HealthTap has a notoriously hard time to get physicians to participate, and most of the questions they get end up being STD related. Even before we connect patients with physicians, we will need to connect physicians with one another. What a world we would live in where physicians could tap into the collected expertise of their peers on demand… | | mHealth in the Wild: Using Novel Data to Examine the Reach, Use, and Impact of PTSD Coach mental.jmir.org This is a fairly specific study, but does show some interesting results in terms of retention of users for mHealth apps, specifically PTSD Coach. Users retention fell very quickly to only 19% after 6 months and 10% after 1 year.This is of course, one example, we know that wearable usages decline very steeply overtime (although less so than this particular mHealth app). User attrition, according to the group that published the study, should not be as worrisome as it seems, so long as the efficacy of the intervention is high and the app is used as intended. In terms of efficacy, the Authors note, “With respect to impact of PTSD Coach, qualitative evaluations of the app were predominately positive, and the perceived helpfulness of the app was among the most commonly identified themes in the study. A substantial number of users reported life-altering benefits, and we observed no reports of any adverse events.”Certainly very interesting data, and this will no doubt serve as a benchmark for further studies on the efficacy of mHealth interventions moving forward. | | | | "For 10 years I've heard people talk about consumerism in health care, but I don't think as health care providers we've felt that until the last two years. In talking to folks that register patients, the folks that are physicians, and nurses, and pharmacists, what I hear consistently from them is that our patients are asking better and different questions than they asked a few years ago."- Nick Turkal, MD, CEO of Aurora Health Care | | | | R. Scott Munro - Utility Infielder @ DocMatter www.startupdigest.com I am a classical languages nerd turned digital health geek. I spend my days researching medical device, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies + helping clinicians efficiently collaborate. I have a passion for the intersection of health and technology, and wholeheartedly believe we are at the beginning of the most exciting era of healthcare. |
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