Ideas We'd Like to Fund
rockhealth.com
rockhealth.com
A big challenge for most accelerators (ycom / techstars / et al) is that the 3 month cycle is not usually long enough for entrepreneurs (new or experienced) to wrap their head around the depths of healthcare, muchness negotiate a sales contract. If you already have experience in this industry, awesome, but if you don't – prepare to spend 3-6 months just navigating the complexities. "Who pays?" is a very interesting question that you should consider in detail, and the answer is usually not the Doctor and almost never the Patient.[1]
In any event, we need more talented entrepreneurs working on some of these issues and not fast-following to be the next cool photo/chat app. I recognize a lot of young technologists don't understand why healthcare sucks as a consumer because your body is in great shape, but spend a few weeks in a hospital and you'll find plenty of opportunities if you have the fortitude to deal with the mountain of bs.
Disclaimer: I'm a former consumer / financial guy turned health tech entrepreneur, and participated in TechStars last year.
[1] The consumerism of healthcare is an interesting topic. I do believe that retail clinics will become as popular as a Starbucks and a shift to a consumer-pays model will likely compliment our new healthcare system, but I don't see it happening for the 60-70% of the population suffering from serious chronic diseases. They just can't afford it.
Totally agree. The healthcare domain is incredibly difficult, especially for small companies that aim their product at medical professionals (speaking from experience here).
- As you said, who pays? There are a lot of different stakeholders in the purchase of a medical device: medical professionals, insurance companies, IT department, hospital risk management, etc. You need to consider them all.
- The healthcare market is incredibly conservative. If you have a fantastic product, but it requires changes to established processes, you need a really good story before someone will even consider purchasing it.
- The healthcare market is used to having products actively pushed to them. Standard marketing (e.g. nice website, advertising, etc) will not bring you customers. You have to keep in mind that medical professionals are used to "study" trips to locations with a nice beach.
- Medical devices (hardware, but also software) require CE certification, FDA approval or other forms of certification. Which can be expensive and time consuming.
Also be very careful about IP when collaborating. Budget lots for lawyers, especially when selling to academic centers.
As we've been growing our startup community here, one thing that interests me and a lot of others is how we can turn our concentration of Fortune 500 and big enterprise companies here into an advantage. Health care seems to be the best lever, to me.
I'd love to connect with the community next time I'm in the Twin Cities. Send me an e-mail (in profile or malay@rockhealth).
Like the Twin Cities, KC has a growing health-tech scene, with Cerner and a slew of new companies. There are also more veterinary biotech companies here than anywhere else in the world, and many of them are looking for ways to bring their technologies into the human-health market.
0. https://twitter.com/johnfein
1. http://sprintaccelerator.com/ or https://twitter.com/SprintAccel
And tech.mn[2] for news.
This is incredible, but in my view, the problem is that people are usually looking for answers, which they can't be given due to lots of regulations. And no one wants to spend $100 or more on a doctor visit for a concern that turns out to be absolutely nothing. Yet oftentimes that's the only choice people are, essentially, given. Not only they have to spend money, but also time. And they only get information from one source (a doctor they visit).
That's why we created http://coinmd.org We've got some bad publicity and some good publicity, which, I think, is a good sign in general. But I honestly hope that projects like ours will flourish, as they open up opportunities to lower the cost of healthcare and make it accessible to virtually everyone in the world.
The companies own the hospital and run it at break-even, and make sure that all costs are low.
I could see something like this working in urban centers where there is a high concentration of large, highly-profitable companies. Silicon Valley, NY, Boston, LA.
It goes way beyond just fixing your appendicitis (which, by the way, that is one massive bill), but should (theoretically) still fix that problem.
It could be a double-blind. Hospital doesn't know which of the companies you work for, and the company doesn't know which employees are costing them money.
the problem is redundant inefficient systems subsidized by your tax dollars.
at hospitals i have seen literally 5 overlapping emr systems for a given service that require MDs to cut and paste data that is inaccurate, stale, and irrelevant to the context of the patient encounter. then they print out a pdf and mark it up with pen. THAT is the real record they use since the emr is so bad
emrs were designed by programmers, not by clinical users. very poor interfaces. 10 clicks just to do anything. need a new feature? 2015 release is just around the corner.
too bad we just spent billions of US tax dollars subsidizing emr systems that are DOA (many physicians i know put their records on box or google docs, hipaa be damned - just to get their work done!)
This would be great. I wish there was something out there that provided objective up-to-date interpretations of health-related medical publications applicable to everyday living. For example, conventional knowledge vilifies saturated fats, but new research seems to indicate otherwise. Numerous diets exist all clamining to be optimal and backed by science. What scares me is finding out 20 years from now, all efforts at maintaining a healthy lifestyle were completely misdirected and in fact, unecessary or even detrimental. What are some ways to accomplish a completely unbiased health guide? It could be based on meta-analysis of academic publications, crowd-sourced, or expert peer-reviews...just something that weighs the reliability of research, points out any deficiencies, and fights the propagation of sensational headlines like "Red meat kills you!" anytime some journalist misinterprets a dubiously controlled experiment on lab rats that shows a statistically insignificant correlation between two variables.
The quality and veracity of a lifestyle product is largely unimportant.
Their "Behind the headlines" blog picks apart popular health stories reported in the (UK) press - http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx
I can't say I would necessarily trust a consumer company for health information, but that's probably an attitude shaped by having a state-funded, not-for-profit health system.
Does anyone know, as I've never heard of them.
Our equity investment model is very similar to the YC/Start Fund relationship. KPCB, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Mayo Clinic fund the companies we select with a $100,000 convertible note, at the same terms of an existing/pending seed round, or on flexible terms up to an uncapped note. We're different from YC in the sense that Rock Health itself takes no equity in the companies. We try to be extremely entrepreneur-friendly, and ultimately, the convertible note is entirely optional. For companies that don't want the note, we write non-dilutive grants up to $20,000.
In terms of whether we help our companies get funding (or not), our companies have raised more than $100M[1] from investors including Collaborative Fund, Felicis, First Round, Floodgate, Founders Collective, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, NEA, The Social+Capital Partnership, SV Angel, True Ventures, and USVP, just to name a few (for context, our first cohort of companies finished at Rock Health in November 2011).
Lack of a ROI focus and accountability for spending at an organizational level at care delivery organizations is the problem.
Consumer apps can sidestep some of the backwards thinking in care delivery, but if you follow the cost drivers systemically, real innovation that moves the cost needle can be as simple as reducing redundant labor costs, or increasing patient self-service at care delivery interfaces. Nothing that can't be done with circa 1996 web technologies.
Unfortunatelty, human/political organizational barriers to such changes protect entrenched interests and prevent game changing innovation.
That said, I am seeing some minimal attention to real change as accountable care/quality metrics become more front and center due to MU2. Let's hope it doesn't degrade into more subsidies for entrenched vendors to maintain the status quo.
If you make an app that uses sensors attached to a smart phone it would make it a lot easier for doctors to diagnose problems. Stuff like taking temperature or blood pressure and then recording it into a database would be great starts.
What are the chances of RockHealth funding something like that?