Failed entrepreneur, perhaps, but one hell of an entertaining writer and storyteller while throwing in bits of wisdoms. I also came away with one insight at the end. I'm going to sign up for the news letter.
When good ideas make bad business
221–230 of 361 posts
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#222Hey, I prototyped something similar to this a while back. It used NLP and Elsavier search API to do entity detection and sentiment analysis on drug/effect pairs. So you would search like "Mirtazapine", and then it would create a word-graph where the drug was in the middle, and it would be connected by things like: Mirtazapine --> Reduces --> Anxiety/Depression Mirtazapine --> Increases --> Hunger The words were color…
i'm interested in the project you mentioned-- drop me an email adam at springhealth.com if you'd like to chat
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#223Others have said this, but $40K is a bargain to get this experience. If you include the opportunity cost, my own 4 year start up failure cost me way more than this (even if you don't include lost opportunities it was probably about this sum of money). You still have the database/website that you can continue to run in your spare time and you never know it might even make you a return in future.
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#224At first I thought this was satire. Here's this guy, who uses a pretty straightforward analysis without any prior healthcare domain experience, thinks he's found the holy grail after a few weeks of work, and then spends all of his money (without first talking to actual domain experts) before he gives up, because Healthcare.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Thoughtful critique is good, but this post breaks the guidelines and falls outside the kind of thing we're going for here. I know it's the internet default generally, but please be more thoughtful when posting comments to HN, especially about other people's work.
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s your blood pressure? I had bad tension headaches from time to time and after starting a bp medicine they’ve basically disappeared.
Pretty spot-on guess! I do have relatively high blood pressure, typically in the 130-150 range. Doctors have suggested it before but since I am borderline I don't really need to be on meds yet. I think it sounds worse than needing to take pain killers occasionally.
I was borderline. Higher bp increases your risk of stroke. I figured the headaches were a warning.. I could be wrong about that though.. I take a very low dose ace inhibitor and it works great. Doc said it wasn't a permanent thing necessarily.. I could probably go off of it if I was more consistent with the DASH diet and exercise more and drop 15-20 pounds.
Keto diet supposedly helps drop the bp too but diets are really hard to maintain and stick with.
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#226Great writeup. Very honest.
His problem is that this product neither increases the revenue of the practice nor does it reduce(or remove) any existing cost. Without that it's a cost center without clear benefits.
> It had been a bit of a working assumption of mine over the past few weeks that if you could improve the health of the patients then, you know, the doctors or the hospitals or whatever would pay for that.
No. Or at least you better show clear benefits becuase EVERY medical product makes claims that they improve patient health or patient outcomes.
What he needs to do is figure if there is some costs that are currently incurred by hospitals and practices that could be reduced or removed by using his product. If he can do that, he'll get sales (and in fact, there is a lot of money in 'population health' and related fields). Otherwise, he's got nothing.
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is precisely why we need universal healthcare. The incentive structure of private markets don't properly value human life.
"This is precisely why we need universal healthcare. The incentive structure of private markets don't properly value human life." Government-run healthcare isn't a panacea that will 'value human life' any more than the insurance companies. You are still a number in a database somewhere. Most new drugs come out of the US and socialized governments create generics at a fraction of the cost, because they don't have to p…
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Re: When good ideas make bad business
#228I still think this idea is powerful. Not because I believe it transforms healthcare, but because it informs consumers a bit more. That’s what seemed to get you excited in the first place. There are a few paths I see still: a. Assuming you own a database, expose your dataset as an API. Consider possible consumers. Open source it, and monitor the usage. Who’s using that data. b. Cold message a few folks on Linkedin fro…
This is a classic case of "it's not a product, it's a feature". This is true of almost everything in healthcare that's software-related: it's only useful if it's integrated with the EMR. This is why you never see software startups in healthcare.
In this case, similar functionality (drug recommendations) exist within EMR systems. Except the recommendations are issued by other doctors and medical researchers, not some ML algorithm and it works transparently with the pharmacy management modules.
Moral of the story: don't get involved with healthcare startups unless you know the structure and economics of the industry. They are very different from consumer / business tech.
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#229Obviously, the doctor is going to torn to shreds here...but I think this kind of misses something about medicine. You prescribe a drug, you know roughly what it does...but aren't totally sure what is going to happen when the specific patient takes it. SSRIs are a perfect example of this.
...and that is kind of why you hire a doctor rather than a computer who has looked at some studies...that isn't really what medicine is.
More generally: this just sounded like a terrible business model. Consumers and probably doctors would value the end product but are you going to get back the money spent on contractors manually going through these studies...no. I can see this making sense for a larger company but these kind of projects are terrible for one guy alone, they just tear through cash.
You also don't seem to have asked how doctors/insurance companies actually look at this data either. I am sure I have no idea but the first question should be: is the user looking through these studies manually? Did you survey doctors: how many studies do you look at a week? Do you look at them before prescribing? Etc...and probably do this before you build obv (and try to get money upfront).
Re: When good ideas make bad business
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is precisely why we need universal healthcare. The incentive structure of private markets don't properly value human life.
At least in the above scenario the hospital has a financial incentive to treat you (part of why we perform loads of unnecessary surgeries in this country). I’m for a public system I just think it is very difficult to do correctly, and if we go into it with idealism instead of extreme pessimism we will fail to secure it against those who prey on exploiting public money.
Private healthcare already preys on exploiting the money of the public.
I'm not convinced the distinction between "public money" and "the money of the public" is particularly clear in these situations.
And of course you don't need a hypothetical "correct" solution - just one that's clearly less exploitative of consumers.