Healthcare IT... not what I would think of as Bio.
As noted in the quote if it is "anything in healthcare" that just seems like, healthcare.
I work at a bioinformatics lab and have been surprised by the big disconnect between the mountains of real-time clinical data produced by healthcare each day, versus the relative trickle of data we get in our lab (after IRB, et cetera).
Seems like there is a lot of room for innovation in Healthcare IT that could connect to bio-research and make the whole research system more like modern software updates versus the box software(research papers) of the 80's.
A lot of the data is simply noise; of the part that might be useful, a lot would contain proprietary information that companies would be reluctant to part with. A huge part of the data is generated but never captured digitally
I'm working on some projects that are tangential to this on both sided and I'd love to hear your thoughts on connecting healthcare IT to bio-research. What kind of healthcare data would you be looking to receive on the bio-research side? and what features of "modern software updates" are most important to you (regularly scheduled like MS Patch Tuesday? seamless in the background like SaaS products?)? do you think of this data as inputs to your research or living next to your research?
Thanks!
I would like to see more research as dashboards more than research as reports. The book “The Half-life of Facts” is relevant: many bio conclusions we’ve made in the past hundred years seems to later be contradicted or at least tweaked as new tech and data come out. NIH and others now have big pushes for personalized medicine, like NCIs Precision Medicine Initiative, because it’s pretty obvious that a great medicine or piece of advice for one person is useless or even harmful to another. The amount of health data we’ve collected in all of human history will be dwarfed by the amount of data we will collect in 2028. Instead of looking back on data and making static conclusions, what if we wrote the code that adjusts the conclusions as more and more data come in. So the research findings will be “updated” continuously, like modern software, as opposed to shipping once in the form of a paper.
I partly work on this project [0] which is not playing by the rules.
Case in point. If you are in Bio or Health or CS or web development have chops and expect large government grant applications to be boring please attempt to get through this (expired) one [1] it was a cool million for a number of different groups.
[0] https://ncats.nih.gov/translator
[1] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-TR-17-0...
Using that info, taking what I consider the most reasonable strict approach (exclude IT, diagnostics, and devices), you'd exclude ~64% of the defined companies.
Without a complete listing of the companies considered, it's hard to gauge how strict you'd need to be in order to be precise, but since the point of this post is to highlight that bio and hard tech companies are being actively funded by YC and have been for a while now, I think the author's assumptions were pretty reasonable.
However, healthcare IT generally has nothing to do with biology.