High Tech and Health Care--A Marriage Made in Cyberspace?

Some techies see the healthcare industry as a new frontier waiting to be upgraded and overhauled. For example, Halle Tecco’s company, Rock Health, is an accelerator that funds digital health startups. Rock Health’s goal is to bring together the worlds of health care and technology to create digital solutions and eliminate inefficiencies of the present health care system. 

According to an article in Fast Company, “Rock Health Breaks Down Health Care’s Hierarchy Startup-Style,” Rock Health had over 800 applicants last year, vying for the opportunity to develop new products and receive $100,000 in funding. Applicants vary; some have medical or technical expertise or both. Entrepreneurs produce a variety of products, like a device that goes in the ear to detect ear infections. There are other success stories with digital products or services. All this brings Rock Health closer to its goal—acceptance by both communities and interest from the industries to subsidize patient product costs. 

1. Ash Damle and MEDgle. MEDgle is an analytics platform that takes the tremendous amount of data available on health care and combines that with patient information to help make accurate diagnosis. With a shortage of general practitioners, MEDgle melds this information to make quick and accurate diagnoses.
    
2. Tamara Khan and Practice Fusion – Walk in any doctor’s office and take a glimpse in the office area and you’ll see walls covered with shelves full of manila patient folders. Doctors and their practices are buried in paper. Practice Fusion offers a way to keep records, prescribe medications and manage appointments digitally. Doctors can allow patients to access records online. They are moving to provide ways to digitize other office processes, like making appointments and filling out intake forms online as well.
    
3. Doug Hirsch and Scott Marlette – GoodRx. These two ex-Facebookers were used to listening to people to find out what their problems were and then creating solutions. People were talking about how they could not afford prescription drugs, so they created GoodRx, which allows subscribers to compare the prices of over 400 million prescription drugs. They wanted to be the online Yellow Pages for prescription drug pricing, so the background of their home page is yellow. 
    
4. Jonathon Bush – Athenahealth. Not so much a product or service company as it is a “disrupter,” Athenahealth wants to shake up the health care industry from the outside. Their idea, “More Disruption, Please” is a series of conferences that bring together entrepreneurs to share ideas, get them excited about creating new products and to eventually come on board to sell Athenahealth’s cloud-based medical records service, AthenaClinicals. 

These techie entrepreneur “matchmakers” are taking what they feel is an industry firmly entrenched in the past and  introducing it to the digital technology. The hope is their offspring will be the new generation of healthcare services for a digital age.

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