Published: 2009-10-20 19:48:09
Author: Dr. Michael Yuan | VentureBeat | October 7, 2009
With the Health 2.0 conference taking place in San Francisco this week and President Obama’s bruised but not yet beaten healthcare reform bill still awaiting its fate on Capitol Hill, it’s a good time to look at how tech startups in the health sector could change the way the US does healthcare.
As information technology drastically brings down cost and improves productivity in other sectors, healthcare remains a “cottage industry” with many barriers and inefficiencies. Healthcare really is the last frontier where technology innovations can drive profound changes and grow brand new business models.
Healthcare spending in the US is $2.5 trillion dollars in 2008, accounting for 17.6% of the GDP and still growing at a rate 150% of GDP growth. For individuals and employers in the US, healthcare cost has become a crushing burden, and yet the system delivers mediocre care for most people. Real healthcare reform that both reduces cost and improves service is a pressing priority.
The past decade of Internet innovations have taught us a lot about how grassroot efforts by consumers can drive changes. The healthcare industry has the potential to leapfrog other industries by applying the latest collaboration and communication technologies to empower consumers. First, technology makes information transparent and allows consumers to direct their healthcare spending on the most effective treatments in the best facilities. Second, technology enables users to participate in their own care with preventive monitoring as well as life style changes. My own company, Ringful, is one of many working to make this a reality. In this article, I’ll be exploring innovations that disseminate relevant information to help consumers make better healthcare decisions. In my next story, I’ll take a closer look at several startups discuss how preventive care solutions and personal health records could help bring down everyone’s healthcare cost.
Lord Kelvin once said “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” The first prerequisite for consumers to make informed healthcare choices is to have information about the performance and cost benefit of various healthcare providers, medical procedures, and drugs. The Obama administration has made the first step in this direction by mandating healthcare providers to install electronic health record systems (EHRs) that are certified to meet the “meaningful use” criteria. While “meaningful use” is a set of complicated criteria, the guiding principal is that the EHR systems must be able to track and report the long term qualify-of-care performance of the provider, making it possible to reward the best performers and penalize the laggards using scientific data. The performance data will eventually be available to consumers via applications built on public data platforms.