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!

Curious about further suggestion on the line-up for TEDxMaastricht

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.

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

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

Develop a simple, straightforward indication of the impact and viability of innovation in healthcare

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!

Will we get the healthcare ecosystem to collaborate on improving mankind?

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:

http://www.data.gov/health

http://www.numerahealth.com/

http://www.gravityeight.com/

http://www.scanadu.com/

http://www.runkeeper.com

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.

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.

See the full gallery on Posterous

5 Healthcare challenges summarized in 1 image

5_healthcare_challenges.pdf Download this file

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!).