Health Startup Digest - 3/18/16

Startup Highlight: Redox, Inc.There are many companies trying to solve the interoperability issue in   March 18 - Issue #5 Health Startup Digest Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. Startup Highlight: Redox, Inc.There are many companies trying to solve the interoperability issue in their own way (I recently saw Heads Up Health speak in SF, for example). Redox is one that recently was highlighted by MDDI after SXSW as one of the shining stars of the conference. EHR integration is incredibly hard because of the highly fragmented market that the HITECH regulation created, Redox already has a few of the largest EHR companies on board, so it will be cool to see how they grow, especially as the government starts to force companies into interoperability moving forward.As always, if you come across news, announcements, videos, or podcasts that you think the other 4,500+ subscribers would benefit from, e-mail me at scott.munro@startupdigestmail.com or tweet @R_Scott_Munro and subscribe to the digest, here.I have also started putting up updates and article overviews throughout the week, you can find those at: www.healthtechdigest.com/ Articles: Tech Tonics: Digital Health Insights for 2016 connectedsocialmedia.com The newest Tech Tonics with David Shaywitz and Lisa Suennen starts off a bit slow, but turns into a great look around the state of digital health at the moment. There is really a lot to unpack within the 30 minute podcast. The mapping of digital health/health tech onto Gartner's Hype Cycle showing that we're in the trough of sorrow (after the peak of inflated expectations), is particularly interesting in the context of healthcare. As Lisa points out, "I don't think it's fair to say that digital health hasn't made a difference […] because I think that part of the problem is the time horizon at which you look at things [ …] 5 years in healthcare is like 5 minutes in other industries, really I think we're going to have to look out 20 years from now and look at what the impact of technology has been on how the healthcare system operates in order to measure efficacy." If we are going down the downslope of the trough of sorrow (to continue the metaphor), then the next 10-15 years in healthcare will be quite interesting as we enter Gartner's "slope of enlightenment" and as we start realizing a lot of these crazy ideas that got over-promised over the last 5 years. How to monetize healthcare using blockchain www.cio.com This is an attention grabber for me. I admittedly don’t know a whole lot about blockchain, but I have heard the applications beyond Bitcoin are staggering. My biggest issue with this article is it starts off with the myriad of fantastical ways that blockchain could enable universal EHRs through the blockchain technology. This sounds all well and good; however, technology is not the biggest interoperability problem, people, companies, and standards are. Once we get some coordination between the large EHR systems, healthcare providers, and the government, maybe this vision can come to fruition, but that seems to be pretty far off.The second use case of being a universal ledger for genomics is more interesting to me.  In this section, the author, Peter Nichol, talks of DNA.bits, that uses “authentication without identification DNA.bits can correlate large populations of genetic samples focusing on HIPAA, genomics, and de-identified continuous sharing of genetic and correlated clinical data. DNA.bits utilizes the Bitcoin platform and can aggregate data from multiple sources without the need to collect it into a central database.” Pretty slick.The article also talks about P2P insurance and quantified self applications. How is pharma shifting its marketing budgets? www.mmm-online.com MM&M comes out with a large trends report everyone year on marketing in healthcare (med tech, pharma, biotech, diagnostics). They released theirs a couple weeks ago, so a little late on the uptick. There are lots of interesting take aways from the stats, and this is a must read for any digital health company that sells into pharma/med tech on the marketing side. A few take aways for me: 1) It’s interesting to see physicians as still THE top priority (despite all this noise around shifting of preferences to adminitrators) 2) Industry is not fully comfortable with “unbranded content” like disease state websites, etc but they are increasing the amount of branded content. This actually makes sense to me given what I’ve seen, and how physicians respond to quasi-branded content. As long as its balanced and evidence driven, they’re OK with it. 3) Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) is losing a bit of steam 4) I am incredibly surprised by the continued lack of physician education and CME programs Taking the online medicine www.economist.com The process of peer review and journal publishing is obviously incredibly important as a means of vetting ideas before they get sent out to the world; however, as this Economist piece notes, this process has created a backlog of findings that are not being published that could be life and time saving if they were more generally accessible. I see this problem through the lens of medical innovation myself, but its just as applicable in biology and other sciences. It takes 17 years for a therapeutic that should be the standard of care (i.e. FDA approved, ready for patients) to become the standard of care. Part of the reason for this, certainly, is the old fashioned approach we have to publishing research and data. Quote of the Week: “I don't think it's fair to say that digital health hasn't made a difference […] because I think that part of the problem is the time horizon at which you look at things [ …] 5 years in healthcare is like 5 minutes in other industries, really I think we're going to have to look out 20 years from now and look at what the impact of technology has been on how the healthcare system operates in order to measure efficacy."- Lisa Suennen, Cardeation Capital Management This Digest is curated by: 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. Do you enjoy receiving this? 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