Just a few thoughts. In general though, Rock Health has grown into a great program and anyone who is pursuing a health related startup should give it strong consideration.
I built something like this in 2009 and got pretty much noplace with it. Our app, Contineo, was an HL7 compliant, back-end agnostic, mobile front end that would work with any HL7 compliant backend.
We were stonewalled by Epic, lead along by Siemens (who had begun talks with us on licensing our technology), we embarrassed Eclipsys as they didnt have a fully HL7 compliant system....
It was really difficult. So we opensourced the tech and gave it to Medsphere to integrate into OpenVista.
I still think there is a significant opportunity in disrupting healthcare in the large hospital, but I don't believe its via the EHR at this time, but through the patient room and patient experience.
If there are any folks out there that want to collaborate on something - I'd love to meet up.
(I applied to Rockhealth's second class and got too interview - but we didn't get selected.)
a) they're working on it, but just not there yet
b) the major EHR do everything in their power to delay progress by providing token access
c) it's actually very hard to sync medical records across so many different standards / systems
d) not enough patient / doctor demand / use-cases, i.e. people don't transfer as much as we think they do, diluting the value of inter-operability
? or something else? all of the above?
This area of HIT fascinates me because I hypothesize that it's a necessary precursor to reform. But, knowing little about the space, I'm not sure where to start my investigation.
They definitely won't play ball with a platform attempting to integrate all of them. That's just a risk; there's no upside. It's possible that none of them would welcome a "platform" at all.
But survey the landscape of EHR vendors. There are a few unique positions of strength out there. Each aspect of uniqueness defines a hypothetical market. The mere existence of some of those markets would develop an asymmetry that simultaneously penalizes competitors and solves a big problem for the partner. Build the spark of the market and you have a significant ally with a strong incentive to nurture your business.
Idea quality indicator: you want the existing player aligned with you, not buying your company (then killing it). They should need you externally.
I'm building a business on one of these hypothetical markets. I made my choice based on my personal capability and fit with the details of the problem. But there are a huge number of different ways to improve both the quality and efficiency of healthcare. (You don't get to solve big problems if there are no big problems.)
Part of the problem with chronic illness is that our (well, my!) dumb monkey-brains don't cope with it too well. I degraded, slowly, over the course of two years -- ending up in hospital very recently. On a day-to-day basis, over that course of time, you just don't notice you're getting worse -- what's an extra minute of cramping, introduced over the course of a month? Having a tool which tracked me, and would let me see (in a chart plotted over time) that I've crossed a line and need to seek help would probably have helped me avoid a week-long stay in hospital, and a commitment to take some (relatively) nasty drugs for the next couple of months.
When I got released, I went and bought a Fitbit Aria for weight-tracking (and am building something that'll query their API and expose my weight data, alongside other data I'll track via a mobile app), and it's excellent. The ease-of-use is the main thing; not needing to manually enter my weight after weighing myself means my data's always there. I'm not sure how I'll accomplish that for the other stuff I want to track, but it should be interesting figuring it out!
So, in short: this is an area I'm stoked to see investment in.
That being said, personal health tracking is definitely a area of interest, and Fitbit and others have proven that there's money to be had and good to be done.
This'd need to tie into a mobile app for manual logging anyway (I'm not exactly going to rig this up at work!) with a backing web service, but yeah. There's definitely room for something clever in this space :).
However, I wasn't exactly thinking about using an accelerator, and I haven't head about them. A quick search on HN doesn't give a lot of results.
Does anyone here has had some personal experience with them? Feel free to contact me by email if you do not want to post a reply.
[I'm not interested on the PR I can find with google, but by personal experiences, opinions]
http://www.quora.com/Rock-Health/Whats-it-like-at-Rock-Healt...
We moved from Wisconsin to be a part of the V4 class, and it was amazing. To be surrounded by great business and technical minds who all give a damn about trying to make healthcare a bit better sustainably is really cool. I'd recommend it.
As with all accelerators, your mileage may vary. If your key needs are technical mentorship or great design leadership, Rock Health won't instantly solve those problems for you, though there are really smart folks working alongside you in the office who may well have faced some of the same challenges before.
What Rock Health does bring is a pretty amazing network within health care, and surprisingly direct access to the people and companies that can help make things happen for you. Need a trial in a hospital? Rock Health makes it (comparably) easy to get one started with top-tier places like UCSF and the Mayo Clinic. Want a meeting with a major payer? United Healthcare will be in the office on Thursday, Kaiser Permanente and Aetna are coming next week. Not sure what particular regulations mean for you? A prominent consultant holds office hours twice a month, and one of the heads of Medicare is coming by soon.
As someone whose career was built designing great products on the consumer web, I got keenly interested in some of the healthcare challenges once I met my wife (a pediatrician). But so much of the space is inaccessible to outsiders. Rock Health was the perfect venue to learn, build, and connect with the digital health space, and I'm a far more capable technologist as a result.
It's still a new program, and there are certainly improvements to be made (and, as I mentioned, it's come a long way), but on the whole, I'd give serious consideration to what Rock Health can bring to your work. For me, it was priceless.
That's a very, very bad idea. Should we educate people about their medical problems in a simple and smart way? Yes. Should we delude people into thinking they are doctors? Absolutely not.
"IANAL" is one thing but there aren't enough asterisks in your keyboard to save you from that bottomless pit of liability.
But frankly, you don't need a high school diploma + a Bachelor's + med school + residency in order capture a huge fraction of a Real Doctor's value as a classifier. Machine-learning-derived classifiers can do even better. This is where there are huge gains to be made.
Every time where cutting out the BS actually matters (pun intended), TPTB "discover" that you can churn out functionally-equivalent doctors with significantly less training. See: military training of doctors, WWII. If you suggested turning away people from doctor training back then because they didn't have a 4-year degree already, they'd laugh or have you committed.
spoiler
...she dies at the end.
this is a joke right, as in this is really the onion under the covers...
