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I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#21

Post by venomsnake »

Here is one question. How will you do with all the tape? This creates a potential lawsuit point in case of failure (or even in case of blamestorming, when the software worked correctly but a scapegoat is needed). So you will need some form of insurance or regulatory approval.

I can create a very few extremely simple solutions in my mind that will be quite precise. You don't even need much coding. In the worst case OCR can do with simple extraction script if the PDF is too unruly. And are a weekend job. But selling it to someone will be a pain.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#22

Post by rwallace »

yeukhon wrote: post #20

As a responsible hospital, I will have to ensure your software will work 99% of the time and that if anything goes wrong you'd be paying the loss. That's a dangerous field to get into.

That's one of the reasons why it matters so much that the guy is actually a doctor. Not only does he have technical expertise in the target domain, he already knows what's going on with safety regulations, liability insurance and suchlike.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#24

Post by thejteam »

Is the time spent entering in data considered billable? If yes, then I doubt the hospital will be interested. If no, then you may be onto something.I was in a presentation not long ago at my former employer and we were being pitched a pretty cool piece of software that would probably have saved me a couple of weeks of tedious interface building. I pointed out to the VP how much time I would save. He said that we bill by the hour. I don't work there anymore.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#25

Post by Agathos »

thejteam wrote: post #24

Is the time spent entering in data considered billable? If yes, then I doubt the hospital will be interested. If no, then you may be onto something.I was in a presentation not long ago at my former employer and we were being pitched a pretty cool piece of software that would probably have saved me a couple of weeks of tedious interface building. I pointed out to the VP how much time I would save. He said that we bill…

Hospitals don't bill per hour; they bill per procedure. Data entry isn't a medical procedure.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#26

Post by pcrh »

yeukhon wrote: post #20

As a responsible hospital, I will have to ensure your software will work 99% of the time and that if anything goes wrong you'd be paying the loss. That's a dangerous field to get into.

It would have to be better than that. A 1% failure rate would give several errors (and potential lawsuits) per week.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#27

Post by leonth »

> Many of the problems in healthcare involve two systems that need data from each other.

This. From my limited experience, even with all the systems able to talk HL7, apparently what message segments the system sends, the message segments the system reads etc. are different from system to system. The result is entire subsystems or heavy customizations for redirection, massaging, and transformation of messages. Something to think about systems integration.

Another approach is to buy subsystems from as few vendors as possible (naturally subsystems from one vendor would all talk among themselves very nicely) - but that is obviously not without any repercussions.

I'm a pharmacist based in Singapore working in IT side of things for the pharmacy department in a public hospital here (means: pharmacy system, EMR, inpatient automated system, decision support). Still learning but would be happy to keep in touch.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#28

Post by jonaldomo »

I would be willing to bet the hospital you work at is paying several million a year for their EMR and all sorts of smaller contracts that probably nobody knows about. One of those contracts probably supports the integration you are looking to do and has not been configured yet because it has not went high up enough the food chain. I think you are better off asking contacting the IT department of the hospital and have them log a ticket to the EMR provider (probably Cerner or Epic) and have them look at it before getting too invested.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#29

Post by indymike »

I started my career making medical devices talk with PCs back in the 80s. Sounds like not much has really changed. Usually these machines have a serial protocol or in newer machines, a webserver and API that can be used to get data in a better format. You are lucky when you get good documentation. Sometimes, the vendor sells PC software as an add on and doesn't want competition.

This problem is probably a goldmine if a decent middleware could be written that grabs data from the device, transforms it to a standard format, and then loads it to EHR/EMR/HCM whatever software the hospital is using.

Re: I'm a doctor - help me disrupt healthcare

#30

Post by wojt_eu »

smalter wrote: post #8

My unsolicited advice: rather than being "fairly certain" that you can make $500/mo with your idea so that you would prefer to start a company first, I suggest that you reverse the order of operations. First, be certain that you can make $500/mo by building it yourself and get the hospital paying $500/mo. Then, if the opportunity looks good, start organizing (aka building an organization, a company) around that. You'…

> First, be certain that you can make $500/mo by building it yourself and get the hospital paying $500/mo.

I'm currently chewing on ideas from "Lean Startup". It suggest to try and validate your idea before even building a product, for example with a interactive prototype. If the OP has a good contact with his hospital, he can show the prototype and ask: "If I build this, will you buy it? Will you pay upfront for a discount?"

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