There are lot of technology issues to be solved in healthcare separate and apart from medical device technology. As one example Heritage Provider Network has been running a competition that will award $3 million dollars to anyone who can develop an algorithm to identify patients who will be admitted to hospital in the next year using historical claims data. Generally predictive analytics is a significant opportunity in healthcare. And as I noted in the OP, HHS has been opening up its huge data set to entrepreneurs and developers. Aetna also has an initiative in play to open up de-identified claims data to the developer community. A lot can be done in the area of developing tools around analytics & reporting and gaining not so obvious insights from claims data at both the individual and aggregate level. The bureaucracy is falling to the wayside but of course in order to accomplish anything developers need to have some understanding about the data they are working with. I have been itching to do something in the area myself but working on the analytics business side of the equation I need technical support.
Ask HN: Why aren't more people doing stuff in the healthcare space?
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Re: Ask HN: Why aren't more people doing stuff in the healthcare space?
#12This is a very good question. I work at a large Canadian hospital in research environment. I see inefficiencies every day, tons of them, I'm seeing new startup opportunities every week.
For example there are lots of problems that could benefit from applications of Machine Learning and modern statistical learning theory, but people working on the problems don't have enough Math/CS background and not sure who to turn to; the quality of data analysis in Nursing/Psychiatry/Paliative care/etc areas is much inferior to, say, quality of data analysis people do in physics or finance; the widely used software (e.g. SPSS, Excel) is mostly crap and things could get done much faster and less error prone if appropriate technologies were developed. I could probably go on forever...
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't more people doing stuff in the healthcare space?
#13Because it's hard and people could die. I think that scares most of us off.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't more people doing stuff in the healthcare space?
#14As a freelance CG artist who changes insurance providers a few times a year, if someone made a site to take care of finding doctors and making appointments I would give you my left arm.
this is in Germany, so might not help you personally, but another small startup in this field is doxter (http://www.doxter.de/)