Health Startup Digest - 4/1/16

Startup Highlight: Spinal SingularityI generally scoff at connected device companies (we really don't   April 1 - Issue #7 Health Startup Digest Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. Startup Highlight: Spinal Singularity I generally scoff at connected device companies (we really don’t need IOT chairs that tweet for me), but Spinal Singularity is looking to bring IOT to catheters in a big way. Their story is also incredibly impactful: the CEO, Derek Herrera, is a veteran who served in Afghanistan and was paralyzed after being shot in combat. Catheters, as Derek mentions in this video, are really not much more than a plastic straw, so there is a lot of room for improvement. Spinal Singularity’s “Connected Catheter” is hoping to breath new life into catheters by allowing them to alert the patient when the patient’s bladder is full, along with sending data points to clinicians. The biggest benefit: instead of ~2,400 disposable catheters needing to be inserted during a year, Derek is hoping Spinal Singularity’s “Connected Catheter” will only need to be replaced 12 times in a year.As always, if you come across news, announcements, videos, or podcasts that you think the other 4,600+ subscribers would benefit from, e-mail me at scott.munro@startupdigestmail.com or tweet @R_Scott_Munro and subscribe to the digest, here. Sadly, no April Fools jokes in this digest, but here’s a fun fact on a medically related April Fools prank the LA Times played in 1931. I have also started putting up updates and article overviews throughout the week, you can find those at: www.healthtechdigest.com/ Articles: HealthQuest's Kong on Teamwork, Medtech, & Investing $225 Million HealthQuest's Kong on Teamwork, Medtech, & Investing $225 Million The first ~13 minutes of this podcast are more focused on investing generally, without a real focus on medtech. At around the 13:30 marker, Dr. Kong gets going on his philosophies on medtech and things start getting juicier. As he points out, only 9% of the $3 trillion we spend on health care is spent on drugs, so his focus is on driving efficiencies for the other 91% of the $3 trillion. He sees that 91% as falling within a continuum from traditional health care services (hands on patients) to pure medical devices. Technology is enabling efficiencies throughout that continuum in different and exciting ways from connected devices to technology driven service delivery. Exploring This Huge Virtual Heart Showed Me The Future Of Medicine www.fastcodesign.com I’ve posted articles here about the applications of VR for medical education, but what caught my eye about this article was the implications for actual patient care. Dassault is a 3D software design company that has a project focused on creating replicas of particular human hearts in a 3D space that surgeons can manipulate to see the effects of particular stimuli, etc. The kicker is, they are trying to create a medically accurate simulation of the heart.The heart is just the beginning for Dassault, their long game is to create medically accurate, 3D simulations for all of our organs that surgeons can interact with via 3D simulators. Why your doctor doesn't care about wearables blog.figure1.com Anyone who reads this digest often knows my stance on Fitbits and other consumer wearables (spoiler, it’s not positive). Figure 1 did a survey of 2,500 physicians and the results were mixed when it comes to data gained from wearables. Most clinicians simply do not have the time to incorporate clinically spurious information into their workflow, and they would rather use more clinically pertinent information. I recommend reading the whole article for details on the results, but I’m still a big believer in clinically relevant monitoring, which I do think will become available to consumers over time. We don’t need to track all of our vitals 24 hours a day 7 days a week, but there will come a time when at-risk populations will be able to continuously monitor their main vitals, and their caretakers will be able to provide them better care because of that. They won’t do this based on steps taken, but based on clinically relevant and standardized data. Can mHealth Sensors Detect Sepsis? mhealthintelligence.com Sepsis is obviously a huge issue in health care. It causes around 200,000 deaths a year in the US alone, and hospitals have been trying to figure out the best ways to fight it. The issue with sepsis is that it is a combination of symptoms and readings taken together, so it can be hard to catch early enough to deal with adequately. This article goes into some background one company looking to solve this issue, EarlySense. The innovative aspect of EarlySense isn’t that it is using sensors to track changes in patient status, but that it is using multiple sensors together to track patient status. Not only does this have the power of fixing Sepsis, but it can also help make sure that alarms in ICUs don’t go off erroneously because a patient’s heart rate is raised (but other vitals are fine).  EarlySense will help clinicians understand when true emergencies are happening which will in turn help alleviate the alarm fatigue present in today’s digital hospitals. Bulldozing Behavior Change Barriers catalyst.nejm.org Behavior changing is a corner stone of some of the most exciting aspects of health care. So much of the waste in health care spending is driven by patients not being good stewards of our own health. David Laibson, the Chair of Harvard’s Economics Department, talks about the issues in behavior changing by contrasting two efforts in this arena: retirement saving and fitness. His concept of a “universal bulldozer” is very interesting to consider for any health care company looking to change behaviors by removing every single barrier for that behavior change. As David says, “you don’t get partial credit in behavior change.” You need to remove all barriers to see big change. Quote(s) of the Week: “Clinicians do not distinguish between the sectors that we think about. They think, ‘I have a problem, my patient has congestive heart failure, what are all the tools that I need to manage that patient. Maybe it’s a medical device, maybe I need some diagnostic sensor to understand how their heart failure is progressing, maybe it’s tech enabled software because I need to put sensors in their house to understand whether they’re gaining weight and fluid and whether I need to manage them more aggressively.’ They’re not thinking I need a health IT answer and a device answer and a diagnostic answer, they’re just thinking, 'I need to manage this patient.’” - Dr. Garheng Kong, Managing Director, HealthQuest Capital “Doctors will save more lives using the time they have on patients proven to be unhealthy by clinical-grade and approved devices than by studying the immense volume of non-standard data from gadgets worn by a healthier-than-average population.”- Ahwaz Chagani and Philippe L. Michaud, Dion Strategic Consulting Group​​ 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 eras 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.