

Ask HN: Healthcare Startups? - getting_there

Does anyone here have experience with healthcare IT startups?<p>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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2mur
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).

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lincolnpark
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.

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veb
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.

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dawson
Yes, I am the founder a funded healthcare (UK) startup. See <http://nhs.info>
and <http://about.nhs.info>

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phlux
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?

