Do Hospital Leadership Pay Attention to Healthcare Startups?

Today I got the press release announcing the 2014 class of startup companies that will be participating in the New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA) program. I’ll put the list of companies in the 2014 class at the bottom of this post for those that are interested.

While I find all of the various healthcare IT incubator/accelerator programs quite interesting, I wonder how many hospital executives are really paying attention to what’s happening with these companies. My gut feeling tells me that very few of them are watching it at all. The reality is that most of them are so busy with the operational aspects of their business that they don’t have time to look at the latest batch of healthcare IT startup companies. Although, I think this is a mistake since they could learn a lot about trends in the industry by looking at these companies.

However, I think there’s a deeper issue here than them just making the time to look at these companies. The larger issue is that most of these health systems write off the idea of working with these “startup” companies without even taking a look at what they’re doing. I think that this is part of the industrialized thinking that we need to change in healthcare to really improve.

Let’s also not confuse what I’m describing with being wreckless. We have a special duty in healthcare to take care of patients in the best way possible. I think working with healthcare IT startup companies helps us fulfill that duty. Sadly, I think many executives don’t see it that way.

What I think could help these executives is to have a forum where they could easily sort through the latest and greatest of what’s happening. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone’s created that forum yet.

2014 NYDHA Healthcare Startup Companies
AllazoHealth addresses the problem of medication non-adherence by leveraging existing member data to anticipate which patients will not take their medications to predict how best to effectively influence each patient to take their medication.  (www.allazohealth.com)

Clinigence’s solution—built around clinical data analytics, sematic data aggregation, and predictive modeling—provides real-time clinically-based reports about care gaps which help healthcare providers improve outcomes to proactively address the shift to value-based models and the growing demand for quality patient care. (www.clinigence.com)

Covertix helps healthcare organizations protect and control confidential data shared between patients, healthcare professionals, hospital networks and third party vendors to improve their coordination of care.  (www.covertix.com)

iQuartic’s technology merges, structures and mines EHR, PBM, claims and mHealth data for analytics that inform and benchmark care based on outcomes/best practices and adjusted population.  (www.iquartic.com)

Noom makes software to help people live healthier.  For consumers, the Noom Weight Loss Coach, with over 11 million downloads, coaches users on nutrition and exercise. Noom’s different patient engagement apps are based on its consumer-facing app. (www.noom.com).

Quality Reviews empowers patients through their flagship product, RateMyHospital.com, a real-time, mobile patient feedback tool.  (www.q-reviews.com) 

Sense Health uses mobile technology to build personal connections between providers and high-risk Medicaid patients to improve outcomes and the quality of care.  (www.sensehealth.com)

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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