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Workflowhacking, mHealth, unwitching & Elderly Care

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2012 (2)
2011 (29)
2010 (16)
2009 (68)
 

7 reasons why should attend HealthStartup III in Nijmegen (.NL), June, 26 - 2012

We’re excited to announce the third edition of HealthStartup to be held in June in Nijmegem, The Netherlands. The theme of this edition is Big Data; therefore we’re looking for startups that place data at the heart of their business model and business proposition.  These can include startups that capture, monitor, aggregate, integrate, analyze or visualize health-related data for any number of purposes, includingpatient monitoring, medical diagnosis, medical decision support, medical research, public health monitoring, self-tracking/quantified self, fitness tools, systems integration and so on.

For HealthStartup III we are looking for 5 high-potential startups to pitch their business to a hand-picked audience of investors and healthcare decision makers.  Following the pitches, each startup will be the focus of a 90 minute break-out session. This is probably going to be one of the most intense and rewarding feedback sessions you will ever have.

If you’d like to present your startup at HealthStartup III ‘Big Data’ then please apply here.

And if you’re not convinced yet, have a look at this presentation outlining the 7 reasons why you should participate!

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If you love us, send more disruptive & digital startups in healthcare!

HealthStartup organises events in Europe that bring together entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals, policy makers and investors.
We also track emerging trends in health-tech and are building an international network of healthcare experts and decision makers. 

Frank Boermeester, partner @healthstartup made a great presentation about the 7 reasons why you should participate at our events:

hehe, for some people 1 reason is already enough :)

If you would like to pitch at an event, please fill in this simple form: http://goo.gl/J4vzO

Thanks!

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Curious about further suggestion on the line-up for TEDxMaastricht

Tedx_logo_maastricht

The 2012 programme of TEDxMaastricht will be centered around five tracks

  • Medicine around the World
  • Health is a data problem
  • E-health is Empowered-Health
  • To talk or not to… listen
  • The gamification of health

More information about these tracks will be revealed later. If you have any suggestions about speakers who would fit in one of these tracks, drop a line below this page.


http://www.tedxmaastricht.nl/abouttedx/background/

TEDxMaastrichts mission is to help the world understand that change in healthcare is imminent. We aim to fire up and grow a movement of people who believe the next decennium should be the era of the rising of self-empowered patients. Embracing the patient, their family and informal care into the healthcare team.

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Assessing the value of an innovative startup in healthcare: updated scorecard

Hsu_pitcher

 

Our departure point is that in healthcare the products/services will have to survive in a unique ecosystem with unique challenges and unique opportunities. Excellent outline of some of these challenges and opportunities can be found in this Harvard Business Review article by Clayton Christensen, Richard Bohmer, and John Kenagy.

Therefore, while the basic principles for startups, customers and investors apply (and here’s a fresh example), there are additional considerations that are very important for healthcare startups.

With that in mind, our objective is to create a simple, straightforward scorecard specific to the healthcare sector that would allow a potential customer or investor to quickly evaluate a startup along the criteria that matter to such customer or investor.

Read more @ HealthStartup.eu

Filed under  //  healhcare   healthstartup   innovation   scorecard   startup   technology  
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Develop a simple, straightforward indication of the impact and viability of innovation in healthcare

Hs_scorecard_v2

 

As we are preparing our first HealthStartup event on October 5, we receive quite a lot of questions on how we plan to evaluate the participating projects – and how we plan to measure the output of the event.

Our goal is to develop a tool that would give buyers of the startups’ services – as well as potential investors – a simple, straightforward indication of the project’s impact and viability. It should also be useful as a guideline for the startups themselves in evaluating potential markets, raising funds, and communicating with various target audiences.

With that in mind, we’ve started developing a “project scorecard” which will include three aspects of an innovation and produce an overall score indicating the viability of a project.

The scoring on a simple numeric scale (1-4) will be carried out by participants during the event; scores would be tabulated and communicated after the event.

Attached is our initial thinking on the parameters within the scorecard. We would very much appreciate your input, any additions (or reductions) to the list of the question, clarifications, etc.

So, please read through the article at HealthStartup and leave your comments!

Filed under  //  healhcare   healthstartup   innovation   westartup  
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Will we get the healthcare ecosystem to collaborate on improving mankind?

Aggregation

 

We have very high development cycles of devices and techniques (18 months or less) AND an industry moving at a ludicrous speed.

We have an enormous amount of incompatible data, coming from: 
  • different devices, 
  • via different systems, 
  • via different (mobile) OSs
Despite great efforts of organisations like Continua Health Alliance, it's an illusion to think that -someday- we will be using the same (open) techniques/standards worldwide to collect and combine health-data.

Striving towards compatibility and interoperability is essential, but I believe this should be complemented by focussing on efficient ways to aggregate all that incompatible data (the equivalent of Friendfeed) and display it as a coherent stream in a personal health record. 
Fusion with data from energy-sources, city- & home-services and social media will further leverage the potential of the collected data.

Extra advantage is that the collected data can be searched upon anonymously. Possibilities to improve mankind by developing cures & remedies faster, improving diagnoses, improving adherence, ... and at the same time lowering the (healthcare)costs and giving more opportunity for 'face time'.

Good examples are:

Will we collaborate to improve mankind?
  • Will we find good plumbers to connect the different data-pipes? 
  • Will the diameter of the data-pipes be wide enough to cope with an enormous data-flow?
  • Will our buckets be big enough to store collect/store the data? 
  • Will we find enough good craftsmen to visualize and interpret that flow? 
  • Will we get the ecosystem to collaborate on improving mankind? 

Slide from 'mhealth is huge' preso at MoMoAMS.

Filed under  //  aggregation   continua   ehr   healthcare   monitoring   quantified  
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Ambient Assisted Living solutions to achieve the market breakthrough

Summary of notes of the AAL workshop in Brussels on June 7, 2011

Personal summary
  • Many platforms and many applications and many users = many end-to-end products/services = 'The Long Tail' in assisted living. Going from 'one size fits all' to 'one size fits one' (quote from openurc).
  • Open source, flexibility, synergy and interoperability are the way to cope with current and future society variables and the velocity of technological evolution. Committee not fond of small scale projects (like Flanders Care) or closed source (like Apple).
  • User based involvement and consolidation of players in the ecosystem is imperative.
  • Whereas I think building data-aggregations (function like translators) will offer solutions for agile connectedness, none of the participants I spoke to seem to agree. Also my believe that creating an open environment through regulated APIs would leverage the potential of SMEs, didn't have many supporters.
  • AAL products and services have the advantage they aren't (always) considered as medical devices.
  • Matchmaking in AAL: find information/products/projects/... I can't understand why the EU hasn't started with making a list of people and companies involved, there's no public searchable list or inventory! If a complex ecosystem is one of the barriers, you should start by identifying the stakeholders!
Liked
  • Users can pick any controller they like to interact with the system.
  • Trialog: standardisation for interoperability is supported by the EU commission
  • Repository (like sourceforge) in Brazil around assisted living. At this time they have 50 apps
  • Medical reminders are displayed on the TV while watching.
  • Freemium in assisted living (business model on operational level).
  • Increase system-family engineering to speed-up development.
  • Fusion with energy, e-health, city- and home-services and social media.
  • Web guidance tools for self-care (like measuring blood pressure).
  • uAAL works together (complementary) to openurc, continua and osami.
  • EU 2020 target: increase healthy years with 2 years
  • Personal UI: anywhere, anytime.
  • Presentations of openURC and Osami.
Barriers
  • Interoperability
  • Hesitant stakeholders
  • Lack of standards
  • Regulation and laws (Continua)
  • No awareness of AAL among end consumers
  • Stand alone projects (small ecosystem or small market) are too expensive
  • Assembly or choreography of the healthcare service ecosystem is a huge challenge (casala.ie)
  • Guidelines for privacy and security
  • Liability
  • Speed of technology: healthcare technology goes faster than the ability of the EU committee to make a roadmap for it
  • Venture capital doesn't fund platforms or ecosytems.
  • Practicality and usability.
  • Producing a healthcare product may cost 100,00 EUR, putting it on the market may costs millions. Cost of production-ready healthcare-product testing (at least 500-1000 people) is too high for SMEs.
  • SMEs are not interested in (open source AAL) platforms, they are only looking for short term business possibilities.
  • Critical support services and sustainable maintenance.

(download)

Filed under  //  aal   ageing   elderly   independent   interoperability   living   opensource   smarthomes   usability  
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5 Healthcare challenges summarized in 1 image

Click here to download:
5_healthcare_challenges.pdf (256 KB)
(download)

Attached an older 1-page depiction I made to illustrate the 5 challenges in healthcare.

I post it here because several people asked if they could use it (YES you can!).
Other reason is that I'm bored by presenters spending 10 minutes explaining these challenges (WE KNOW! move on!).

Filed under  //  challenge   healthcare   trends  
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Assessing healthcare innovations in ICT: the society scorecard

Scorecard_healthcare_society

What's the real worth of an innovation in healthcare? 

What's the impact on a society?

Preparing for Westartup healthcare, I dug up a simple scorecard I used to determine the impact of an ICT - innovation in healthcare.
The scorecard gives a score, based on questions from 5 different angles:

Care organisation
  • What's the ROI? (workflow, efficiency and general cost reduction) 
  • Does it have a quantifiable impact on marketing and recruitment?
  • Will it simplify making business/management decisions?
  • Is it interoperable with other aspects of the healthcare ecosystem?
  • What are the costs to train people to work with the product/service? How simple is it to use?
Care consumer
  • Does it offer convenience? Will it allow to reshape healthcare to fit people's lives (and not the other way around)?
  • What about participating in the process? Will it help the consumer to interact?
  • Exactly how does it improve the quality of the treatment from a consumers perspective?
  • Will it offer peace of mind?
  • Is it easy/simple to use?
Care practitioner
  • Can you quantify the improvements on efficiency, workflow and time?
  • Is it user friendly? Is it simple to use? Is it intuitive?
  • Will it enhance interaction with other practitioners?
  • How interoperable is it with the other tools I use?
  • Can it simplify decision making?
Taxpayer
  • Will it lower healthcare costs? Will it lower reimbursement costs by lowering re-admission, enhancing adherence, ... or by lowering efficiency in workforce and processes? 
  • Does it improve the quality of treatment?
  • Can it speed up developing a cure?
Business
  • I can haz 458 Italia?
The weight of the 5 scores might differ for each product/service, but calculating an overall result is feasible and meaningful.
Suggestions on improving this simple model are welcome!

Filed under  //  healthcare   ict   innovation   scorecard   westartup  
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Cloud storage for the exchange of health information

Click here to download:
ZH_dossier_voorbeeld.pdf (257 KB)
(download)

For several years I'm complaining that paper health records are getting lost when one of the elderly residents of our carehome is hospitalised.

We did all kinds of efforts to prevent loss of the papers, but no success till now.
In case of loss we had to fax (alas, no email) the papers to the central reception of the hospital (alas, no fax at the specific department).
I was approached by a hospital and a software vendor to find a solution.
A logical suggestion was to use cloud storage (like Amazon, Dropbox, Nomadesk, ...) and to use encrypted folders (per user or per organisation) for such papers. Such cloud solutions are easy to use, very flexible, easy to implement and safe enough for this purpose. When hospital staff reacts outraged 'how unsafe this is', I point them to the current 'solution' where we fax the papers to the central reception.
I'm very curious which cloud solution they are going to produce, how cheap it will be and how user friendly it will be.

Filed under  //  cloud   communication   ehr   hospital  
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