Ask HN: Healthcare Startups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Healthcare Startups?

Does anyone here have experience with healthcare IT startups?

It could be worst of both worlds (the bulk of enterprise and the bureaucracy of government) but the opportunities seem massive. Any thoughts appreciated.

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I'm a physician and also a hobby-hacker. I have a ton of ideas for productivity/efficiency boosts for a pretty broad spectrum of pain points across the daily grind of practicing medicine. There is a lot of opportunity. Unfortunately, the thing stopping me from pursuing most (nearly all) of them is the ten-ton monster called HIPAA. The second that you touch patient data you are opening yourself up to a potential beat down (US-centric obviously). There is not a startup-friendly route for handling patient data (ala PCI-DSS compliance workaround with PayPal or Braintree, etc).

The existing electronic health records landscape is incredibly fragmented. I read a post somewhere recently that listed 400 different EHR businesses. The interoperability problems are the same ones that the internet experienced in the early days. Little standards, different platforms, siloed data. I think the interesting opportunities are in developing applications that help medical practices fulfill the "meaningful use" criteria. Each individual module can be fulfilled using specific technology, that doesnt necessarily need to be certified. For example, a practice can use one technology to fulfill their CPOE requirement while using a completely different vendor to do Clinical Decision support. You can be the go to player for a specific module.

The place I work for makes medical software for administration type stuff at family practices etc. We can't even host our -own- apps, because of privacy concerns. We have to make it, and deploy it on their servers in a local environment.

Joe might have 3k in savings at the bank, and someone could hack in and take it. Okay, that's a bugger.

But if that hacker can hack in to Joe's medical files, and see he has Herpes, then he's going to be mad as a cow.

Yep, the opportunities are MASSIVE - especially here in New Zealand - the hardest will be getting people to trust you imo.

I am in the process of starting one.

There are a lot of issues around what you are offering; the barriers are varied and many.

But they are all surmountable - though you need to take a shotgun approach.

For example - if you went to Health 2.0 yo would have noted several things: 1) the founders of health 2.0 are money hungry and unscrupulous 2) everyone was focused on the silo of the PHR 3) The small practice iPad application space is really crowded 4) big EHRs are walled gardens - big monolithic gorillas with no interest in partnering or providing data via HL7 compliant channels

5) EVERYONE suffers because of this.

6) the secret killer in the space is Cisco.

Typical hospital IT organizations are either HUGE (kaiser) or outsourced and incompetent (Eclipsys / Perot) or in-house and understaffed (city/county like SF DPH/DPT)

What specifically are you interested in?

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