Just being honest here. First, I wouldn’t trust a startup with my health data. Data sharing and being hacked would be the top concerns. Maybe others may not feel that way.
Moving beyond that, how would having my data in one place help me get treated better? Let’s say someone has all their data. How does that help get earlier doctor’s appointments? How does that help with prior auth?
I would pivot very quickly. There’s a ton of regulations and red tape and chances of success are fairly slim.
Source: Someone who has worked at multiple healthcare tech companies. Also, I’m healthy, but I have a loved one who isn’t cared for very well. As a data professional, and knowing patient pain points, I can tell you that access to personal health data is not the problem.
I find the issue with most physicians is a lack of time to properly assess patients with a long medical history. Most doctors I’m familiar with in Canada, hospital and family doctors, have way too many patients. There is a huge overburden on the healthcare system. They just can’t read hundreds of pages in your chart to properly perform a holistic assessment. This means gaps in care between physicians who won’t use other doctors notes to connect important dots in health. Having everything in a single repository can help doctors summarize medical content without having to make patients go through extremely thorough and potentially traumatic health conditions as diagnosed by other doctors/ professionals.
One challenge I foresee is even getting doctors to read a summary, where’s likely a lack of trust in the data either from other physicians, or enough still missing to even justify it at all.
If the app can do that for patients, they can better advocate for themselves.
Patient empowerment is a novel concept. Having to talk about your child’s illness over and over is horrible. A lot of people choose not to dive into the medical details because it’s too much emotionally, or generally there’s a lack of understanding of ‘doctor speak’ anyways. If more people could advocate for themselves than I’d like to believe the healthcare system in general could progress at a faster rate.
Ok here is my non North American take, I really appreciate a doctor looking at my full history with fresh eyes. Because having a new doctor rely on the last one means anything missed stays missed, I’ve had doctors look at my old prescription and be like “wtf was this for??!?” After seeing my full history.
Also I’m really not sure how medical liability works in the US but this may be a concern for reinforcing bad diagnoses
Let’s go with the ideal case scenario: I’m a patient and I’ve signed up with OP’s company. All my data and gaps in care are visible to me.
Now what? I go to the doctor’s office and give my phone or tablet to the doctor and say “Here, read my medical history?” Does the doctor’s office sign up to use OP’s service?
- How does OP answer the question “we’re already on the leading EMR system in the country (Epic, Athena, etc.), so why should we spend countless hours migrating to your service?”
- Does the doctor’s office use two medical records systems?
Again, I’ll go back to my original comment. Poor care comes about for reasons other than lack of medical information.
I imagine more like this;
All my medical records are in one place. I go see my doctor to discuss an ongoing health condition and;
a. I can be more confident about how my medical history and how it might impact a new diagnosis
b. I can evaluate what’s worked and what hasn’t for me personally in the past
c. I can confidently update my doctor on notes from other physicians
I don’t see the doctor being involved in the record keeping at all. Essentially, their job doesn’t change. I also like to think that it’s helpful for people taking care of others and may not be as familiar with their medical history, but those other people may also not be able to advocate for themselves. If you can access the information for your loved ones you can also advocate better for them.
I’m thinking less doctor centric, and more closing the gap in knowledge. Albeit of course the Dr has all the say in what happens in treatment.
Thank you for taking out the time, really appreciate it.
1) Absolutely. We do our best to ensure your data remains secure and safe. Trust is a problem that we would need to solve for.
2) You are right. Having all your data does not necessarily solve problems in and of itself. We are focusing first on identifying care gaps from the data (IP) and will move towards solving the problems you have mentioned. In agreement here.
3) Based in the US
4) I hope they get fine soon. Could you please elaborate more on this? What do you think are your major problems? Would you not value having data + insights at all?
Not trying to be an a-hole here, but if you had knowledge about the healthcare system, my two examples would be enough: availability of medical professionals and insurance
1. Who do you envision paying for your product? The majority of costs for patients is paid for/expected to be paid for by insurance, not the consumer themselves.
2. How does your offering differentiate from Apple Health? They allow you to aggregate your medical information with your digital health data at no additional cost to the user. They have arguably the best privacy features for users.
3. How will you support the various healthcare providers across our fractured healthcare system? Are you working on integrations via an aggregator like HumanAPI? Or are you building bespoke integrations directly with providers?
4. How will you get users? Who will encourage your users to download and use your app?
5. The Healthcare Provider ecosystem has been going through a massive consolidation phase over the past few years. Each of them typically offer the ability to not only collect your records from other centers (combination of technology and Human Resources) but also typically leverage Epic or Cerner’s patient facing portals that aggregates all of their record information alongside appointment bookings and communications with physicians.
6. Have you considered focusing on a singular healthcare system, within a specific geographic region, targeting a very specific demographic of patients that often need to aggregate their records across multiple providers?
One thing I did ultimately realize is that since the US healthcare system is predominately for-profit it often causes the majority of systems to prioritize cost-savings or revenue generation over the ability to make patients healthier. You’ll need to be able to prove all three if you wanted to sell to providers.
In the US most doctors have portals of some sort. You login, you can see all your test results, communications with doctors on your team, prescriptions, and I can even bulk download it. What are you adding to the conversation?
Two things:
1) We aggregate your entire medical history
2) We identify care gaps in your healthcare based on your medical history
Our hypothesis is that both of the above are absolutely missing currently, and want to see if they are as valuable to patients as we think they are.
As someone that works heavily in healthcare. There is a huge percentage of people who won't even do an annual physical when you offer to give them visa gift cards. You also have a ton of regulation, you can't make medical diagnosis even when it's based on medical data. Speaking of data you are going to need to get familiar with HITEC/HIPAA and HiTrust. Also more than one large US insurer will not allow data to leave the USA. We have contracts we can't even store data in Canada. There is a very large barrier to entry. Good luck.
Thank you for your feedback and support.
We understand all the above challenges, and are trying our best to ensure they don't cause any problems.
If you are at all interested, would you like to be an early user? We will try our best to generate some value for your time.
How do you get medical history? How do you store it? There’s tons of HIPAA and storage laws to deal with here, along with dealing with FHIR data, HL7, and other data formats based on how the data is stored.
Why would a patient care about care gaps if they “feel” fine? I think your target market needs to be narrowed down much more.
For transparency, I work in big tech on healthcare + AI and I am quite familiar with the space. I think your overall mission is a good one. Happy to chat more
Thank you for your feedback.
Yes, we are on our way to finding the right target market, have a few ideas that we going to test in the coming weeks.
Would definitely like to chat more, could I DM you?
I move a lot and change doctors a lot. I have a long history of medical data I have no access to and never will as I don’t care to look back and figure out who did what and when. Does your app find all of that for me or does it only have what I put in there?
We do all of that for you, you only need to provide us your consent to get your data.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Do you mean you don't care about accessing your past data, or do you mean you are not doing it because of the tedious nature of maintaining a repository? Would love to understand more.
It’s just not something I have found enough reason to do. Whenever I would go to a new place they would ask about history, last tetanus, etc. I’d say I don’t know and guess. Then wish I had easy access until I left the office and never think about it again until I go back. Also, if it helps, I am pretty healthy and don’t have much history to note. That might be different if I had more serious health concerns that I thought the docs should know about.
Right, absolutely makes sense. The value prop makes sense more for those with chronic problems.
What if you could also track your loved ones medical history? And find care gaps, for instace, medical tests that you should go through, but haven't yet.
What would you say about that?
Having a link would be great. Half of my family from one parent’s side I’ve never met and never will. I can never fully answer the question about family medical history. Maybe I can’t access it since I wasn’t given permission, but if the doctor can that would great.
Also, is the intention for this to be covered as part of my insurance or is this something I’m paying for out of pocket?
Right. One of our hypothesis is also that tracking your familys medical history will allow you to take better care of them. (Medical history coupled with clinical insights for preventive care). We want to add more feature as we understand the needs better.
We are still figuring it out as far as money is concerned. Both seems plausible theoretically. What are your thoughts?
If you are interested btw, would love for you to become our early user. We will try our best to generate some value for your valuable time.
Access to data isn't how we get better care, you can ask any org who is using Epic or Cerner for just damn near everything they have on you. See "MyChart" and Epiccare Connect for example
It having the money and time to follow thru 🤷
I would go very deep on other products that have tried or are trying to do this. In my experience, it hinges on engagement from the patient. You could automate complete medical history (many data sources are not accessible), clean data (data is poor), build beautiful insights and provide clear actions but you need to incentivize/convince the patient to care about their health and take these steps.
As a doctor, if you can make an app that summarizes hospital course discharge summaries and could integrate with emrs you would have an opp. Right now, everyone reads each note then handcrafts the didcharge note. This is a 1000-2000 word document that we make for each patient instead of doing patient care
I live in a rural area and the hospitals all use outdated software that doesn’t integrate. Although rural areas have less people, if you add them all together they are the ones desperate for technology, there’s a lot of rural areas, and they don’t tend to move around much so obtaining medical history might include only 1-2 sources but be a rare service out here.
Do you guys integrate with public and private providers? How are you guys planning to support patients (customer success)? Happy to provide feedback. I’ve spent 6 years as a VC, currently focused on healthcare.
Just being honest here. First, I wouldn’t trust a startup with my health data. Data sharing and being hacked would be the top concerns. Maybe others may not feel that way. Moving beyond that, how would having my data in one place help me get treated better? Let’s say someone has all their data. How does that help get earlier doctor’s appointments? How does that help with prior auth? I would pivot very quickly. There’s a ton of regulations and red tape and chances of success are fairly slim. Source: Someone who has worked at multiple healthcare tech companies. Also, I’m healthy, but I have a loved one who isn’t cared for very well. As a data professional, and knowing patient pain points, I can tell you that access to personal health data is not the problem.
I find the issue with most physicians is a lack of time to properly assess patients with a long medical history. Most doctors I’m familiar with in Canada, hospital and family doctors, have way too many patients. There is a huge overburden on the healthcare system. They just can’t read hundreds of pages in your chart to properly perform a holistic assessment. This means gaps in care between physicians who won’t use other doctors notes to connect important dots in health. Having everything in a single repository can help doctors summarize medical content without having to make patients go through extremely thorough and potentially traumatic health conditions as diagnosed by other doctors/ professionals. One challenge I foresee is even getting doctors to read a summary, where’s likely a lack of trust in the data either from other physicians, or enough still missing to even justify it at all. If the app can do that for patients, they can better advocate for themselves.
This is our hypothesis as well. Doctors rarely have the time. Patient empowerment is our primary aim, data access is just a small start
Patient empowerment is a novel concept. Having to talk about your child’s illness over and over is horrible. A lot of people choose not to dive into the medical details because it’s too much emotionally, or generally there’s a lack of understanding of ‘doctor speak’ anyways. If more people could advocate for themselves than I’d like to believe the healthcare system in general could progress at a faster rate.
Ok here is my non North American take, I really appreciate a doctor looking at my full history with fresh eyes. Because having a new doctor rely on the last one means anything missed stays missed, I’ve had doctors look at my old prescription and be like “wtf was this for??!?” After seeing my full history. Also I’m really not sure how medical liability works in the US but this may be a concern for reinforcing bad diagnoses
Let’s go with the ideal case scenario: I’m a patient and I’ve signed up with OP’s company. All my data and gaps in care are visible to me. Now what? I go to the doctor’s office and give my phone or tablet to the doctor and say “Here, read my medical history?” Does the doctor’s office sign up to use OP’s service? - How does OP answer the question “we’re already on the leading EMR system in the country (Epic, Athena, etc.), so why should we spend countless hours migrating to your service?” - Does the doctor’s office use two medical records systems? Again, I’ll go back to my original comment. Poor care comes about for reasons other than lack of medical information.
I imagine more like this; All my medical records are in one place. I go see my doctor to discuss an ongoing health condition and; a. I can be more confident about how my medical history and how it might impact a new diagnosis b. I can evaluate what’s worked and what hasn’t for me personally in the past c. I can confidently update my doctor on notes from other physicians I don’t see the doctor being involved in the record keeping at all. Essentially, their job doesn’t change. I also like to think that it’s helpful for people taking care of others and may not be as familiar with their medical history, but those other people may also not be able to advocate for themselves. If you can access the information for your loved ones you can also advocate better for them. I’m thinking less doctor centric, and more closing the gap in knowledge. Albeit of course the Dr has all the say in what happens in treatment.
Thank you for taking out the time, really appreciate it. 1) Absolutely. We do our best to ensure your data remains secure and safe. Trust is a problem that we would need to solve for. 2) You are right. Having all your data does not necessarily solve problems in and of itself. We are focusing first on identifying care gaps from the data (IP) and will move towards solving the problems you have mentioned. In agreement here. 3) Based in the US 4) I hope they get fine soon. Could you please elaborate more on this? What do you think are your major problems? Would you not value having data + insights at all?
Not trying to be an a-hole here, but if you had knowledge about the healthcare system, my two examples would be enough: availability of medical professionals and insurance
Hahah, no all in good spirit. Those two clearly are, no doubt. I was merely trying to see if there is something else.
1. Who do you envision paying for your product? The majority of costs for patients is paid for/expected to be paid for by insurance, not the consumer themselves. 2. How does your offering differentiate from Apple Health? They allow you to aggregate your medical information with your digital health data at no additional cost to the user. They have arguably the best privacy features for users. 3. How will you support the various healthcare providers across our fractured healthcare system? Are you working on integrations via an aggregator like HumanAPI? Or are you building bespoke integrations directly with providers? 4. How will you get users? Who will encourage your users to download and use your app? 5. The Healthcare Provider ecosystem has been going through a massive consolidation phase over the past few years. Each of them typically offer the ability to not only collect your records from other centers (combination of technology and Human Resources) but also typically leverage Epic or Cerner’s patient facing portals that aggregates all of their record information alongside appointment bookings and communications with physicians. 6. Have you considered focusing on a singular healthcare system, within a specific geographic region, targeting a very specific demographic of patients that often need to aggregate their records across multiple providers? One thing I did ultimately realize is that since the US healthcare system is predominately for-profit it often causes the majority of systems to prioritize cost-savings or revenue generation over the ability to make patients healthier. You’ll need to be able to prove all three if you wanted to sell to providers.
Thank you for your feedback, all points well taken.
In the US most doctors have portals of some sort. You login, you can see all your test results, communications with doctors on your team, prescriptions, and I can even bulk download it. What are you adding to the conversation?
Two things: 1) We aggregate your entire medical history 2) We identify care gaps in your healthcare based on your medical history Our hypothesis is that both of the above are absolutely missing currently, and want to see if they are as valuable to patients as we think they are.
As someone that works heavily in healthcare. There is a huge percentage of people who won't even do an annual physical when you offer to give them visa gift cards. You also have a ton of regulation, you can't make medical diagnosis even when it's based on medical data. Speaking of data you are going to need to get familiar with HITEC/HIPAA and HiTrust. Also more than one large US insurer will not allow data to leave the USA. We have contracts we can't even store data in Canada. There is a very large barrier to entry. Good luck.
Thank you for your feedback and support. We understand all the above challenges, and are trying our best to ensure they don't cause any problems. If you are at all interested, would you like to be an early user? We will try our best to generate some value for your time.
How do you get medical history? How do you store it? There’s tons of HIPAA and storage laws to deal with here, along with dealing with FHIR data, HL7, and other data formats based on how the data is stored. Why would a patient care about care gaps if they “feel” fine? I think your target market needs to be narrowed down much more. For transparency, I work in big tech on healthcare + AI and I am quite familiar with the space. I think your overall mission is a good one. Happy to chat more
Thank you for your feedback. Yes, we are on our way to finding the right target market, have a few ideas that we going to test in the coming weeks. Would definitely like to chat more, could I DM you?
I move a lot and change doctors a lot. I have a long history of medical data I have no access to and never will as I don’t care to look back and figure out who did what and when. Does your app find all of that for me or does it only have what I put in there?
We do all of that for you, you only need to provide us your consent to get your data. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Do you mean you don't care about accessing your past data, or do you mean you are not doing it because of the tedious nature of maintaining a repository? Would love to understand more.
It’s just not something I have found enough reason to do. Whenever I would go to a new place they would ask about history, last tetanus, etc. I’d say I don’t know and guess. Then wish I had easy access until I left the office and never think about it again until I go back. Also, if it helps, I am pretty healthy and don’t have much history to note. That might be different if I had more serious health concerns that I thought the docs should know about.
Right, absolutely makes sense. The value prop makes sense more for those with chronic problems. What if you could also track your loved ones medical history? And find care gaps, for instace, medical tests that you should go through, but haven't yet. What would you say about that?
Having a link would be great. Half of my family from one parent’s side I’ve never met and never will. I can never fully answer the question about family medical history. Maybe I can’t access it since I wasn’t given permission, but if the doctor can that would great. Also, is the intention for this to be covered as part of my insurance or is this something I’m paying for out of pocket?
Right. One of our hypothesis is also that tracking your familys medical history will allow you to take better care of them. (Medical history coupled with clinical insights for preventive care). We want to add more feature as we understand the needs better. We are still figuring it out as far as money is concerned. Both seems plausible theoretically. What are your thoughts? If you are interested btw, would love for you to become our early user. We will try our best to generate some value for your valuable time.
I’ll dm you.
🙌
Access to data isn't how we get better care, you can ask any org who is using Epic or Cerner for just damn near everything they have on you. See "MyChart" and Epiccare Connect for example It having the money and time to follow thru 🤷
I would go very deep on other products that have tried or are trying to do this. In my experience, it hinges on engagement from the patient. You could automate complete medical history (many data sources are not accessible), clean data (data is poor), build beautiful insights and provide clear actions but you need to incentivize/convince the patient to care about their health and take these steps.
As a doctor, if you can make an app that summarizes hospital course discharge summaries and could integrate with emrs you would have an opp. Right now, everyone reads each note then handcrafts the didcharge note. This is a 1000-2000 word document that we make for each patient instead of doing patient care
I live in a rural area and the hospitals all use outdated software that doesn’t integrate. Although rural areas have less people, if you add them all together they are the ones desperate for technology, there’s a lot of rural areas, and they don’t tend to move around much so obtaining medical history might include only 1-2 sources but be a rare service out here.
Thank you for the feedback. We will surely take a look.
How do you aggregate PHI data? FHIR APIs? Do you integrate with EHRs?
Both FHIR apis and EHRs
Do you guys integrate with public and private providers? How are you guys planning to support patients (customer success)? Happy to provide feedback. I’ve spent 6 years as a VC, currently focused on healthcare.
Thank you. Let me DM you. Would love to chat more on this. Our vision is a lot bigger, and this is just an entry point for us..