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Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

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Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#21

Post by tamersalama »

pc86 wrote: post #17
frio wrote: post #10

As someone both with a chronic disease, and who works in Health IT -- personal health tracking is something I'd very much like to see (and am working on in my spare time). Part of the problem with chronic illness is that our (well, my!) dumb monkey-brains don't cope with it too well. I degraded, slowly, over the course of two years -- ending up in hospital very recently. On a day-to-day basis, over that course of tim…

How would something track (to use your example) cramping? Short of having a device where you press an "I have cramps" button then press it again when they go away, I'm not sure how any type of software could support your specific example. That being said, personal health tracking is definitely a area of interest, and Fitbit and others have proven that there's money to be had and good to be done.

That device is represented in every phone and tablet. It just needs the software to capture it.

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#22

Post by markolschesky »

Mz wrote: post #20
markolschesky wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the above, IMHO. In San Francisco, Kaiser could electronically share patient data with every other system running Epic with very little technical work and price. We're talking hours of work here. That would let them share data with UCSF, PCMH and every other Epic site. They don't. Why not? It's because sharing patient data makes it easy to poach patients, and that's bad for business. There are similar situati…

I would think HIPPA is one of the issues here. Federal law says it is a big no no to freely share health info without a raft of signed paperwork, basically.

Typically customers handle this through some type of waiver system. Generally at the initial visit in an organization a patient signs a ton of releases that state that the parent organization allowed to share patient information as needed through the course of treatment. Most people want to share their information, but there are systems in place to restrict access as needed by law/best practices. Patients can opt out of data, and some data sharing systems support this through various technical choke points. If you were a nurse at one organization, you may not want people snooping through your medical records at another medical organization. The Direct Protocol supports this through pseudo-anonymity of accounts.

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#23

Post by Mz »

markolschesky wrote: post #22
Mz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think HIPPA is one of the issues here. Federal law says it is a big no no to freely share health info without a raft of signed paperwork, basically.

Typically customers handle this through some type of waiver system. Generally at the initial visit in an organization a patient signs a ton of releases that state that the parent organization allowed to share patient information as needed through the course of treatment. Most people want to share their information, but there are systems in place to restrict access as needed by law/best practices. Patients can opt out…

I worked at an insurance company for five years. Part of my job was to get authorizations so I could request medical records. I had annual hippa training. I was not allowed to read any medical records or request any medical records that were not directly involved in doing my job. One standard of hippa is "minimum necessary." That means I am only entitled to as much information as is absolutely necessary to do the job and not more. So I suspect that some system to share records has serious challenges.

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#24

Post by jacalata »

tamersalama wrote: post #21
pc86 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would something track (to use your example) cramping? Short of having a device where you press an "I have cramps" button then press it again when they go away, I'm not sure how any type of software could support your specific example. That being said, personal health tracking is definitely a area of interest, and Fitbit and others have proven that there's money to be had and good to be done.

That device is represented in every phone and tablet. It just needs the software to capture it.

It doesn't even need to be real-time. An app/text message that asks you every three hours "been cramping up lately?: No, once or twice, several times, lots"* would collect a lot of relatively accurate information, and easily show you 'whoa, I cramped up almost every hour this week, two months ago it was once a day!'

*in my answers I'm assuming that we are tracking the incidence count, rather than duration/severity - this is easily adapted if necessary.

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#25

Post by lucidrains »

samstave wrote: post #15
dr_ wrote: post #5

1) A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing. It would require them to play ball and large players, like Epic, probably won't. 2) Chronic disease management is important, but really challenging. People don't really spend their days thinking about their illness. They don't look forward to having their blood sugar assessed. Any kind of disease management program is going to require that the patien…

>* A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing* I built something like this in 2009 and got pretty much noplace with it. Our app, Contineo, was an HL7 compliant, back-end agnostic, mobile front end that would work with any HL7 compliant backend. We were stonewalled by Epic, lead along by Siemens (who had begun talks with us on licensing our technology), we embarrassed Eclipsys as they didnt have a…

hey, would love to talk with you a bit more as a fellow med/tech enthusiast.

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#26

Post by pepachino »

lucidrains wrote: post #25
samstave wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing* I built something like this in 2009 and got pretty much noplace with it. Our app, Contineo, was an HL7 compliant, back-end agnostic, mobile front end that would work with any HL7 compliant backend. We were stonewalled by Epic, lead along by Siemens (who had begun talks with us on licensing our technology), we embarrassed Eclipsys as they didnt have a…

hey, would love to talk with you a bit more as a fellow med/tech enthusiast.

Me too, 2nd year med student and tech enthusiast.

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#27

Post by whafro »

guylhem wrote: post #7

One of their ideas is quite close to something I'm working on. However, I wasn't exactly thinking about using an accelerator, and I haven't head about them. A quick search on HN doesn't give a lot of results. Does anyone here has had some personal experience with them? Feel free to contact me by email if you do not want to post a reply. [I'm not interested on the PR I can find with google, but by personal experiences…

I was in the first batch at Rock Health, and now continue to help out as a mentor. It was a great experience for me, and it's come a long way in the last couple years.

As with all accelerators, your mileage may vary. If your key needs are technical mentorship or great design leadership, Rock Health won't instantly solve those problems for you, though there are really smart folks working alongside you in the office who may well have faced some of the same challenges before.

What Rock Health does bring is a pretty amazing network within health care, and surprisingly direct access to the people and companies that can help make things happen for you. Need a trial in a hospital? Rock Health makes it (comparably) easy to get one started with top-tier places like UCSF and the Mayo Clinic. Want a meeting with a major payer? United Healthcare will be in the office on Thursday, Kaiser Permanente and Aetna are coming next week. Not sure what particular regulations mean for you? A prominent consultant holds office hours twice a month, and one of the heads of Medicare is coming by soon.

As someone whose career was built designing great products on the consumer web, I got keenly interested in some of the healthcare challenges once I met my wife (a pediatrician). But so much of the space is inaccessible to outsiders. Rock Health was the perfect venue to learn, build, and connect with the digital health space, and I'm a far more capable technologist as a result.

It's still a new program, and there are certainly improvements to be made (and, as I mentioned, it's come a long way), but on the whole, I'd give serious consideration to what Rock Health can bring to your work. For me, it was priceless.

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#28

Post by radnam »

samstave wrote: post #15
dr_ wrote: post #5

1) A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing. It would require them to play ball and large players, like Epic, probably won't. 2) Chronic disease management is important, but really challenging. People don't really spend their days thinking about their illness. They don't look forward to having their blood sugar assessed. Any kind of disease management program is going to require that the patien…

>* A mega platform on top of existing EHR's won't be an easy thing* I built something like this in 2009 and got pretty much noplace with it. Our app, Contineo, was an HL7 compliant, back-end agnostic, mobile front end that would work with any HL7 compliant backend. We were stonewalled by Epic, lead along by Siemens (who had begun talks with us on licensing our technology), we embarrassed Eclipsys as they didnt have a…

Include me as well. !

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#29

Post by frio »

pc86 wrote: post #17
frio wrote: post #10

As someone both with a chronic disease, and who works in Health IT -- personal health tracking is something I'd very much like to see (and am working on in my spare time). Part of the problem with chronic illness is that our (well, my!) dumb monkey-brains don't cope with it too well. I degraded, slowly, over the course of two years -- ending up in hospital very recently. On a day-to-day basis, over that course of tim…

How would something track (to use your example) cramping? Short of having a device where you press an "I have cramps" button then press it again when they go away, I'm not sure how any type of software could support your specific example. That being said, personal health tracking is definitely a area of interest, and Fitbit and others have proven that there's money to be had and good to be done.

Cramping's one of my symptoms; I'm being a bit coy. To be more blunt (the disease is Ulcerative Colitis), the main thing is bowel movements per day. At the moment, I've got an NFC tag sitting in the bathroom that I swipe to log a motion (as the path of least resistance)... but (as mucky as it sounds) I'd like to hack something together with an Arduino/Raspberry Pi and a weight sensor attached to the toilet, which could detect that I'm sitting down and log a movement for me automatically (in much the same way the Aria automatically logs my weight!).

This'd need to tie into a mobile app for manual logging anyway (I'm not exactly going to rig this up at work!) with a backing web service, but yeah. There's definitely room for something clever in this space :).

Re: Healthcare tech ideas we'd like to fund

#30

Post by pc86 »

frio wrote: post #29
pc86 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would something track (to use your example) cramping? Short of having a device where you press an "I have cramps" button then press it again when they go away, I'm not sure how any type of software could support your specific example. That being said, personal health tracking is definitely a area of interest, and Fitbit and others have proven that there's money to be had and good to be done.

Cramping's one of my symptoms; I'm being a bit coy. To be more blunt (the disease is Ulcerative Colitis), the main thing is bowel movements per day. At the moment, I've got an NFC tag sitting in the bathroom that I swipe to log a motion (as the path of least resistance)... but (as mucky as it sounds) I'd like to hack something together with an Arduino/Raspberry Pi and a weight sensor attached to the toilet, which cou…

That's a really good idea. I could see a small Arduino board with wifi and a FlexiForce[0] (just the first thing that came up in Google for "Arduino weight sensor"), and like you said a mobile component that would either be a stopwatch to actually log or a time entry for past movements (or when you didn't have your phone, etc).

My sister has Crohn's and one of college roommates had UC so I'm somewhat familiar with it.

My contact info is in my profile if you want to talk about this more.

[0] http://bildr.org/2012/11/flexiforce-arduino/

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