Thinking of starting a Health IT company? Here are top three industry challenges

> the sad truth is that medical industry doesn't welcome software disruptions

This is a message that really needs to stop being regurgitated around the technology start-up space.

The medical industry DOES welcome software disruptions. The past two years have been the two biggest years in healthcare software disruption, in terms of VC dollars invested in that sector[0], the number of accelerators that have accepted healthcare related start ups (YC has now invested in a several) and the rise of accelerators focused on healthcare (e.g. Rock Health, Health Box) that have graduated over 100 'small and agile' teams that have established product-market fit, and raised institutional funding.

Healthcare is a space that does require a significant understanding of industry-specific knowledge (third party payment models and regulations are examples), but I feel that many other industries that are being disrupted have similar barriers to entry.

In my experience, most developers ignore the medical industry, citing similar complaints as yours, but neglect to mention the incredible growth that has been demonstrated in that industry for a while now...

[0] http://rockhealth.com/resources/rock-reports/digital-health-...

This article understates the issues delivering software solutions to patients, providers, or payers. The lack of data standards has completely crippled the ability for new companies/products to innovate and break through. When I worked at a healthcare VC, we deemphasized IT in favor of medical devices because the path for success is much clearer and easier to trod.

The reason I can be so confident that it's the data standards, BTW, is because the DICOM data standard exists for medical imaging. IIRC, the founder of Heartlab invented the format, it somehow escaped a proprietary home, and dozens of companies innovated on top of it. The existing EMR vendors - GE, Cerner, Epic, etc - all have proprietary data standards for storage and interchange. My due diligence on this revealed that the companies would each have to spend three years re-writing their software against a common data standard. Of course, they should have to. It would help patients immensely and all sorts of innovations would spring forth, just like after DICOM.

When castles were everywhere, the bigger castle won. Then airplanes came along and essentially made castles obsolete as an aspect of war. The future solutions in health IT will likely appear to be orthogonal to current conceptualizations of the problem.

I am curious what type of solution you have been pondering, if you don't mind me asking. (If you don't want to post it publically, my email adress is in my profile.)

As a current developer for a health IT company, much of this is true. Even with the current incentives to go electronic, many doctors just simply prefer paper charts and are willing to forgo the $40k a year just to keep things the status quo. My particular company is growing by leaps and bounds because we started with a very simple Practice Management model and grew out from there whereas I see a lot of startups try to jump directly into EMR's which can be a tough market to crack.

But for anyone looking to get into Health IT, I highly recommend it. Healthcare is a multi-billion dollar industry that is in dire need of some disruption and the programming challenges are both interesting and rewarding (shameless plug: we're hiring).

Some quite good points:

"For example, inside a hospital, operating rooms (OR) are often profit centers, and emergency departments (ED) are often cost centers. The hospital may be receiving subsidies to maintain its EDs based on its ratio of OR profits to ED losses, in which case a product that ultimately makes ORs more profitable may not be worthwhile to the hospital."

To an ambulance service (emergency and pre-hospital medicine is my area/passion), IFT (Inter-facility Transport) is a near guaranteed paycheck, 911 response is generally a cost center.

DrChrono has it good, because the government will pay their customers (the doctors and facilities) for the implementation.

But it's definitely an area that could do with some work in unseating some entrenched and ultimately complacent incumbents.