Inc.com claims you can find everything you need to know to start and grow your business now. They published a slideshow of 17 promising healthcare startups and we noticed some trends: fitness is big, which makes sense. If we get more people moving, we get fewer people coming in for preventative care — heart attacks, obesity, Type-II diabetes. However, we also noticed how much inspiration for entrepreneurship stemmed from red tape.
Here are some slideshow highlights:
Iconic Data
With SwiftPayMD, Iconic Data’s new iPhone and iPad app, you can dictate diagnoses and BILLING CODES using voice recording software. We like jobs, we like technology, we like a lot of things. We don’t really like the need for an app like this, though. It reminds us of this timely quote:
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” – Henry David Thoreau
Iconic Data, at its finest, is still hacking at the branches of our healthcare woes, not the root i.e. red tape. But a sidenote: that’s not meant to disparage the company DOING the actual work. The fact is healthcare’s broken. And there are myriad ways to approach a solution.
Simplee
It’s like the Mint.com of healthcare (Mint.com makes it easy to understand how you spend your money). Simplee specifically helps people manage out-of-pocket healthcare costs. Of course, one of the platform’s benefits is showing you the status of your insurance deductible (typically covert, right?). And if you take red tape out of the question, you’re left with an app that our patients technically could make use of. However, it’s funny to think part of the app’s inception comes from the fact that paying for healthcare is inherently confusing. Again, thank you, red tape. Also worth noting: The company says they can help spot errors in your bill; they cite some sources that say about 80% of bills contain them. Touche. We’re working to simplify the billing feature on our own app, Atlas.md EMR, so that these types of billing errors are minimized.
Patients Know Best
Patients Know Best helps physicians easily easily access medical records that would typically be trapped in other hospital or clinic IT systems. Bureaucracy is always a strange beast. Start using more computers, says Meaningful Use. But keep the data in silos, says HIPAA. We’ll bank on the free market fixing the conundrum of privacy vs. access long before Washington.
MotherKnows
MotherKnows wants to help aggregate your children’s medical history so that it can be accessed on a tablet, phone or browser. They also make it easy to share your child’s immunization records with school nurses without doctors needing to fill out any forms. Atlas.md EMR employs the same principle — put what you need, where it’s easily retrievable, and get rid of everything else. We’re glad to see MotherKnows responding to the muddy, bureaucratic healthcare mess with something lean and efficient.
Blueprint Health
This is our favorite startup on the list. Healthcare, being the largest and most complex industry in the U.S., has actually motivated a company whose sole function is to bring people together to solve healthcare’s problems. Blueprint Health, two times a year, invites 20 to 30 entrepreneurs to their 12,000 square foot Soho loft for three months. There, the invitees are mentored by experienced healthcare entrepreneurs in the U.S. Each company also gets $20,000 in capital. Are you interested in the program? View accelerator details here.