Innovation in Healthcare is a MUST!

“If you do not innovate, you die!” We have seen many examples in the retail industry like Toys R Us, Sears and many other industries. Healthcare is partially protected because of it is importance and government support.

The Healthcare industry takes a big chunk off the annual budget, around 20%, second after the military budget, and yet the US healthcare outcomes are not among the best countries in the world! A big reason why the healthcare industry is performing so poorly because it still depends on old technologies to communicate like pagers, old process to perform tasks like papers and whiteboards, and expensive overhead equipment with old supply chain systems.

After the crash of 2008, lots of organizations started pushing towards a change and started supporting new ideas and innovations in the healthcare industry, and the pioneer, in my opinion, is MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and their program MIT Hacking Medicine.

They applied their way of forward thinking in solving (Hacking) problems to the healthcare industry by bringing together a group of enthusiastic individuals and entrepreneurs to solve these problems and form startups to improve and, in many cases, disrupt the market.

Since 2012, 45 startups were created out of the MIT Hackathon programs and raised around 150 Million dollars in funding. Maybe the most famous one is PillPack Inc who disrupted the pharmaceutical industry and created a direct-to-customer medication delivery service, and guess who acquired this startup in 2018? You guessed it right, Amazon with a deal worth around 1B dollars!!

Now, the push is more towards making the process and workflow more efficient at the healthcare facilities whether it’s inpatient or outpatient setting. The ACP (American College of Physicians) is also stepping into the innovation melting pot and trying to educate the healthcare providers about the importance of technology to facilitate the day-to-day workflow, decrease the documentation burden, and improve patient care.

Healthcare 4.0 is the newest wave focuses on making the healthcare systems interconnected, increase data sharing, and eliminate at some point the systems silos. Healthcare should be a continuous, proactive process. The system now is build to be intermittent and reactive. Intermittent meaning that you visit your doctor intermittently and healthcare providers react to your illness. We need to transform it to be continuous using wearable devices to receive data about patient health and analyze it to predict health outcomes and prevent illnesses.

I am looking forward to seeing what will the tech giants have to say regarding healthcare, I am talking about Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. If everything goes according to their plan, big disruption is coming.

Again, Innovate or die.

PS: I had the privilege to participate in the ACP — MIT Hackathon 2019, and winning the 1st place with software to improve the inpatient workflow.