Health Startup Digest - Issue #4

Sorry friends, no start up highlight this week : (As always, if you come across news, announcements,   March 11 - Issue #4 Health Startup Digest Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. Sorry friends, no start up highlight this week : (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: A new effort to help startups with clinical testing www.innovateli.com New York state is trying to foster digital health by connecting startups with clinical sites to test their products, devices, and apps. This is an off shoot from the failed Pilot Health Tech program that New York tried to do. Even if the last attempt failed, the idea here is great. Many young digital health and health tech companies are starting to realize they will need clinical evidence for the benefits they are espousing, and without that clinical evidence they will be DOA. It’s surprising to me that California, Texas, and other states aren’t following suit here. This could be a great model to support innovation in health care in many other states. MedTech Insight Interview with Profusa Chairman and CEO Ben Hwang itunes.apple.com I had highlighted Profusa in one of my weekly digests a couple months back. Last Tuesday, Ben Hwang was interviewed by Pharma & Medtech Business Intelligence, and it’s a great listen. When I originally looked into the company, I did not realize exactly how transformational the technology was. I knew that continuous monitoring would be a game changer, especially for long periods of time, but the use cases go well beyond diabetes and extend into wound care and COPD disease management. As Ben Hwang mentions, he is not the only implantable biosensor out there, but their approach does allow for much longer sensor longevity. The real power of Profusa is best explained in a quote from Ben, “We believe fundamentally that our platform solves a really important barrier for the vision of digital health to actually come to fruition. You can imagine that digital health, personalized health, personalized medicine, telemedicne, all of these wonderfully exciting innovative areas, while the technology exists what’s really missing is a stream of medical grade data or data that’s of a significant quality where high value therapeutic and clinical choices can be made.” That has always been what bothered me about wearables, you couldn’t really make clinical choices, they were consumer first, clinical second (if that). Profusa promises to start the movement towards clinical first, technology-driven health data collection. 3 ways in which a 3D printer may one day save your life www.washingtonpost.com 3D Printing isn’t new in medicine, physicians have been talking about it for at least 6 years; however, this piece in the Washington Post does provide a great overview of a few ways 3D printing will impact healthcare beyond organ creation (which is where most people’s minds go to). 3D printing pills for better dosage contral will be a very interesting application, and, while I’m not sure about the size of the impact, 3D printing organ models for surgery planning will also be another way medical education can benefit from new technologies. The Best Way to Improve Health Care Delivery Is with a Small, Dedicated Team hbr.org Health 2.0 SF had a great talk with Dr. Jordan Schlain this week that this new HBR article reminded me of. In the talk, Dr. Schlain mentioned that hospitals around the country have “Discharge Teams” and these teams really need to be switched around to “Outcome Teams” to match the new “fee-for-outcome” mindset that is being incentivized in health care today. Similarly, this article goes over what Chris Trimble calls the “middle ground of innovation.” Those innovative measures that are between large-scale investments and small-scale steps. An example is a team responsible for congestive heart failure (CHF) patients at Essentia. This team follows up with patients, checks in with them, builds trust, and gets to know their lives to ensure they are adhering to medication and improving outcomes. Before the “fee-for-outcome” model, these incremental innovations were not incentivized, and were much harder to get off the ground. Hopefully we end up seeing much more of this “middle ground” innovation, especially in patient specific care teams that operate outside typical reimbursement structures to improve outcomes. Quote of the Week: “Doctors aren’t technophobic they are money losing and time losing phobic”- Dr. Jordan Schlain  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? Please share it:     Tweet     Share   Carefully curated by Health Startup Digest with Revue If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here.