Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Three smartest ideas for making healthcare smarter, cheaper and more competitive

These three ideas from speakers at the MidAmerica Healthcare Venture Forum last week - some still incubating, others in full swing - are as the ones with the best change to get rid of waste in healthcare and cut overall costs.

 

In Chicago last week, our MidAmerica Healthcare Venture Forum included 25 speakers, 30 startups, and 1 Google hangout. I spoke with a virologist who is working on a shot that can kill cancer cells, an investor who specializes in royalty deals, and a designer who wants to improve the user interface for healthcare. I learned a lot from these one-on-one conversations as well as all the other healthcare experts who spoke at the event.

These ideas – some still incubating, others in full implementation – stood out as the ones with the best chance to get rid of waste in healthcare and cut overall costs.

Mining EHR data to schedule the right hospital staffing

GE Healthcare’s Mike Swinford talked about four startups that the company had acquired in the last several years. One was a company that analyzes EHR data to schedule the right nurses at the right time.

“The company looks at the data to determine how sick the people in the hospital are and what nurses they need that week,” he said.

Everyone has felt the frustration of waiting at the hospital – to be seen in the first place, to get a bed, to get a test done. The other side of this equation is doctors and nurses and other professionals having to come in when they are off or work overtime. If API Healthcare and GE Healthcare can solve both sides of this equation, that would be a huge step forward.

 

A brokerage for health data

Many people are concerned – rightly so – that the consolidation forces currently shaping the healthcare market are pushing the little guys out. Independent physicians can’t survive and enormous healthcare systems will take advantage of their monopolies to jack up prices. That’s why it was so refreshing to hear UPMC’s Pamela Peele describe a way for small healthcare systems to work together to increase their competitive advantage.

“The play that should be happening there is an analytic brokerage play,” she said. “Your 25,000 (patients) gets combined with (another’s) 25,000 until pretty soon you’ve got one broker who’s learning across all of this data and then pushing it back out.”

Of course there are privacy issues around this kind of idea, but people are more and more willing to share their data – regardless of the promised privacy protections. Also, this kind of regional collaboration could help other elements of the health IT infrastructure like health information exchanges.

 

Everyone mentioned partnerships: executives from GE Healthcare and Mayo Clinic Ventures, accelerator directors, corporate investors and venture capitalists.

One message that came out of a conversation with a panel of investors is that it’s no longer taboo for corporate investors to get in on a deal early. GE’s Swinford said that these are the days of co-opetition and partnerships that include entrepreneurs and coinvestors and healthcare providers and insurance companies. Jim A. Rogers of Mayo Clinic Ventures said that this new approach to growing healthcare companies is the new normal.

“Gone are the days when industry comes up from a tech divorced from clinical input. Also gone are the days of researchers coming up with products without industry guidance,” Rogers said.

He said that he often considers what the founders of the Mayo Clinic would think about how the health system is run today. He thinks that Dr. Charlie and Dr. Will Mayo would have two suggestions for the leaders of the modern clinic. One would be: Understand market realities and think ahead. The second would be: Look for truly rewarding partnerships.

“They would encourage us to find meaningful and true collaboration, where both sides are going to win and both sides are contributing and getting something out of it,” he said.

So many forces are pushing (or dragging, in some cases) everyone in healthcare to work together. It’s easy to pay lip service to the need to collaborate, but it’s even better to hear executives say that partnerships are simply the way business is now done.

Veronica Combs

Veronica is an independent journalist and communications strategist. For more than 10 years, she has covered health and healthcare with a focus on innovation and patient engagement. Most recently she managed strategic partnerships and communications for AIR Louisville, a digital health project focused on asthma. The team recruited 7 employer partners, enrolled 1,100 participants and collected more than 250,000 data points about rescue inhaler use. Veronica has worked for startups for almost 20 years doing everything from launching blogs, newsletters and patient communities to recruiting speakers, moderating panel conversations and developing new products. You can reach her on Twitter @vmcombs.

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