Health Startup Digest - 4/22/15

Startup Highlight: PUSHI have often ranted/raved about the importance of scientifically/clinically re   April 22 - Issue #10 Health Startup Digest Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. Startup Highlight: PUSH I have often ranted/raved about the importance of scientifically/clinically relevant wearables. PUSH might not be clinically based, but it is incredibly scientific and provides high caliber athletes with insights into their training routines well beyond “steps” taken. The company is already working with pro teams across many different sports (and countries). There is some very cool innovation happening in sports tech, and it will be fun to see how it all pans out moving forward.As always, if you come across news, announcements, videos, or podcasts that you think the other 4,800+ subscribers would benefit from, e-mail me at scott.munro@startupdigestmail.com or tweet @R_Scott_Munro and subscribe to the digest, here.If you have feedback/suggestions, please let me know, here. Articles: Should Consumers Be Allowed to Order Their Own Lab Tests? www.wsj.com This is a little over a week old, but it is a great pro and con piece on whether consumers should be able to order their own lab tests. I tend to agree with the “con” argument as there are so many tests that patients should not get, and we do not have the medical training to determine which tests would be good vs. not good. Trusting patients in this way will only lead to an even higher cost of health care in this country. Listening with text mhealth.amegroups.com This study should be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s a study done by CirrusMD which provides asynchronous physician check-ins (just a fancy way of saying text-based check-ins). Using texts for patient engagement and communication is not a new idea, Health Loop has been doing it for some time, and plenty of studies have talked through its efficacy. One interesting point this study brings up: it’s also cheaper. In the continuum of care, in person is the most expensive, but video/voice are still more expensive than straight text message. In a perfect world, per CirrusMD, we could triage patients to the appropriate level of care as needed. They’ve seen ER visits decrease based on their platform, but, again, a fairly biased study. A Guide to Health Startups medium.com The author here admits that this is a limited view of what the “Health Startup” environment might look like, but I wanted to post this anyway because I think it does provide interesting descriptions of various focus areas in health tech.I think this is a very limited view of Health Startups and doesn’t take into account some areas within which there are very large opportunities for entrepreneurs (namely, selling technology to payors and med device/biotech/pharmaceutical companies). I also don’t really think it makes sense to split the world of Health Startups up into Patient Empowerment, Health Coordination, Personalized Medicine, and Payment Reform. In my mind there are more accurate/appropriate ways to dissect the Health Tech/Digital Health market (namely by the end-users of the product in question - consumer, provider, payor, industry - with further granularity to break down sub-groups and foci). Perhaps when the author says Health Startup he means simply those tech companeis that sell to providers or patients, but even then I would likely dissect the world differently.Just my opinion on that, but I do enjoy looking through these dissections of the health tech world. What 140 CEOs Want You To Know About Digital Health | Rock Health rockhealth.com I love quotes, they are bite-sized pieces of wisdom passed on from one person to another. I’ve actually collected quotes from all sorts of sources for most of my life, so I was a big fan of Rock Health’s collection of quotes from it’s CEO Summit. See a few of the ones I particularly liked below. "A good investor should have:1) True conviction in your business. 2) Judgment. By nature, investors helicopter in because they have other jobs. Having good judgment means they're going to see information and not make snap judgments—and know that their voice carries a lot of weight. They'll seek out more information and be respectful of the decision-making process.3) The ability to also tell a story. This is important for when we use investors to close candidates that are possibly considering other options and representing our company to other stakeholders. They need to be as good a representative about us as we are."-David Vivero, Amino "If your product is regulated, do not hide from the FDA. Talk to them early and find supporters in the agency. The FDA is more diverse than you might think and people in leadership are often more capable of collaborating with you. If you are able to share your insights into health tech and communicate new ways of doing things, you do have a chance to shape their thinking—and they are open to that."-George Savage, Proteus Digital Health "We don't do anything for free. That's a disaster because the pilot partner won't pay attention to you."-Joanna Strober, Kurbo Health Quote of the Week: "If your product is regulated, do not hide from the FDA. Talk to them early and find supporters in the agency. The FDA is more diverse than you might think and people in leadership are often more capable of collaborating with you. If you are able to share your insights into health tech and communicate new ways of doing things, you do have a chance to shape their thinking—and they are open to that."-George Savage, Proteus Digital Health 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. 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