
Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund - malay
http://rockhealth.com/2013/02/ideas-wed-like-to-fund-2/
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frio
As someone both with a chronic disease, and who works in Health IT -- personal
health tracking is something I'd very much like to see (and am working on in
my spare time).

Part of the problem with chronic illness is that our (well, my!) dumb monkey-
brains don't cope with it too well. I degraded, slowly, over the course of two
years -- ending up in hospital very recently. On a day-to-day basis, over that
course of time, you just don't notice you're getting worse -- what's an extra
minute of cramping, introduced over the course of a month? Having a tool which
tracked me, and would let me see (in a chart plotted over time) that I've
crossed a line and need to seek help would probably have helped me avoid a
week-long stay in hospital, and a commitment to take some (relatively) nasty
drugs for the next couple of months.

When I got released, I went and bought a Fitbit Aria for weight-tracking (and
am building something that'll query their API and expose my weight data,
alongside other data I'll track via a mobile app), and it's excellent. The
ease-of-use is the main thing; not needing to manually enter my weight after
weighing myself means my data's always there. I'm not sure how I'll accomplish
that for the other stuff I want to track, but it should be interesting
figuring it out!

So, in short: this is an area I'm stoked to see investment in.

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pc86
How would something track (to use your example) cramping? Short of having a
device where you press an "I have cramps" button then press it again when they
go away, I'm not sure how any type of software could support your specific
example.

That being said, personal health tracking is definitely a area of interest,
and Fitbit and others have proven that there's money to be had and good to be
done.

~~~
frio
Cramping's one of my symptoms; I'm being a bit coy. To be more blunt (the
disease is Ulcerative Colitis), the main thing is bowel movements per day. At
the moment, I've got an NFC tag sitting in the bathroom that I swipe to log a
motion (as the path of least resistance)... but (as mucky as it sounds) I'd
like to hack something together with an Arduino/Raspberry Pi and a weight
sensor attached to the toilet, which could detect that I'm sitting down and
log a movement for me automatically (in much the same way the Aria
automatically logs my weight!).

This'd need to tie into a mobile app for manual logging anyway (I'm not
exactly going to rig this up at work!) with a backing web service, but yeah.
There's definitely room for something clever in this space :).

~~~
pc86
That's a really good idea. I could see a small Arduino board with wifi and a
FlexiForce[0] (just the first thing that came up in Google for "Arduino weight
sensor"), and like you said a mobile component that would either be a
stopwatch to actually log or a time entry for past movements (or when you
didn't have your phone, etc).

My sister has Crohn's and one of college roommates had UC so I'm somewhat
familiar with it.

My contact info is in my profile if you want to talk about this more.

[0] <http://bildr.org/2012/11/flexiforce-arduino/>

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dr_
1) A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing. It would
require them to play ball and large players, like Epic, probably won't. 2)
Chronic disease management is important, but really challenging. People don't
really spend their days thinking about their illness. They don't look forward
to having their blood sugar assessed. Any kind of disease management program
is going to require that the patient be minimally engaged, yet data still
effectively collected and assessed. The only evidence of real consumer
engagement in health has been with respect to personal fitness. 3) HIPAA in a
box is going to require some involvement of the government. They've thrown
these regulations out there with rather vague specifications as to how they
would be applied to ehealth initiatives. If the government wants to enforce
this, which they have begun doing, they have to provide better guidance.

Just a few thoughts. In general though, Rock Health has grown into a great
program and anyone who is pursuing a health related startup should give it
strong consideration.

~~~
samstave
>* A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing*

I built something like this in 2009 and got pretty much noplace with it. Our
app, Contineo, was an HL7 compliant, back-end agnostic, mobile front end that
would work with any HL7 compliant backend.

We were stonewalled by Epic, lead along by Siemens (who had begun talks with
us on licensing our technology), we embarrassed Eclipsys as they didnt have a
fully HL7 compliant system....

It was really difficult. So we opensourced the tech and gave it to Medsphere
to integrate into OpenVista.

I still think there is a significant opportunity in disrupting healthcare in
the large hospital, but I don't believe its via the EHR at this time, but
through the patient room and patient experience.

If there are any folks out there that want to collaborate on something - I'd
love to meet up.

(I applied to Rockhealth's second class and got too interview - but we didn't
get selected.)

~~~
lucidrains
hey, would love to talk with you a bit more as a fellow med/tech enthusiast.

~~~
pepachino
Me too, 2nd year med student and tech enthusiast.

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siculars
"...make everyone of us a doctor..."

That's a very, very bad idea. Should we educate people about their medical
problems in a simple and smart way? Yes. Should we delude people into thinking
they are doctors? Absolutely not.

"IANAL" is one thing but there aren't enough asterisks in your keyboard to
save you from that bottomless pit of liability.

~~~
SilasX
I tend to agree in general. And expecting advice over an internet forum is
ridiculous in the best of all worlds.

But frankly, you don't need a high school diploma + a Bachelor's + med school
+ residency in order capture a huge fraction of a Real Doctor's value as a
classifier. Machine-learning-derived classifiers can do even better. _This_ is
where there are huge gains to be made.

Every time where cutting out the BS actually matters (pun intended), TPTB
"discover" that you can churn out functionally-equivalent doctors with
significantly less training. See: military training of doctors, WWII. If you
suggested turning away people from doctor training back then because they
didn't have a 4-year degree already, they'd laugh or have you committed.

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guylhem
One of their ideas is quite close to something I'm working on.

However, I wasn't exactly thinking about using an accelerator, and I haven't
head about them. A quick search on HN doesn't give a lot of results.

Does anyone here has had some personal experience with them? Feel free to
contact me by email if you do not want to post a reply.

[I'm not interested on the PR I can find with google, but by personal
experiences, opinions]

~~~
markolschesky
This is helpful:

[http://www.quora.com/Rock-Health/Whats-it-like-at-Rock-
Healt...](http://www.quora.com/Rock-Health/Whats-it-like-at-Rock-Health)

We moved from Wisconsin to be a part of the V4 class, and it was amazing. To
be surrounded by great business and technical minds who all give a damn about
trying to make healthcare a bit better sustainably is really cool. I'd
recommend it.

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syntheticzero
This is well worth applying to -- amazing program

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p2w
wait. they want to invest in one of the most heavily regulated and friction
filled business domains out there and the seed is 100k!?!?!?

this is a joke right, as in this is really the onion under the covers...

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Mz
Funny, I actually have an idea for their top listing. Funny to see that
listed, I mean.

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huhsamovar
"Your Black Swan idea"? I hope they realise that...

spoiler

...she dies at the end.

~~~
bchjam
I think they're probably referring to Taleb's concept of black swan
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory>)

