eHealth Entrepreneurship (eBook)

How to start and grow a digital health startup

Heidrun Flaadt Cervini, Jörg Dogwiler (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
172 Seiten
Books on Demand (Verlag)
978-3-7583-3437-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Digital health technologies are rapidly changing the practice of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship. While the digital health market is booming, a high percentage of eHealth start-ups are not successful in the mid or long term. We decided to publish this book in order to help emerging business ideas in the field of eHealth understand and develop the keys to success.

Textauszug

01

The eHealth Business

About the author

Mathew Farkash is an entrepreneur, an investor, and the founding General Partner of Blueprint Health, an early-stage healthcare investment firm, which Fast Company named a top-ten most innovative healthcare company in the world. He has invested in 110+ companies, helping them raise $750 million in capital, and his portfolio has generated nearly $1 billion in exit proceeds. Additionally, Mathew served as the Interim VP of Strategy and Business Development at Touch Surgery, where he guided them in raising their private financing rounds and assisted in refining and executing their US and global commercial plan prior to their acquisition by Medtronic. He is an international speaker who has presented in Beirut, Copenhagen, Dubai, and across the US on topics that include entrepreneurship, innovation, and resiliency, and serves as a visiting faculty member on digital health entrepreneurship at Università della Svizzera italiana. Mathew is a graduate of Brown University and NYU Stern. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Introduction

Digital health is an exciting place to be building companies

The early 2000s saw the rise of several early digital health entrants, which were promising but had yet to prove their ability to scale efficiently, drive widespread adoption, and capture significant market share from healthcare incumbents. They faced significant challenges, such as a lack of proven efficacy, byzantine regulatory hurdles, unclear reimbursement pathways, and low adoption of digital health tools by consumers, employers, payers, and providers.

Fast-forward two decades and many digital health solutions have published clinically significant outcomes, achieved Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, become reimbursable as a medical claim, and climbed the rankings of the most downloaded mobile applications by consumers. Self-insured employers, health plans, and health systems have more enthusiastically embraced digital health platforms and programs as they seek to improve the employee/member/patient experience, optimize workflows, and rein in soaring costs. These profound changes have led to a coming-of-age moment in the digital health space, with the COVID-19 crisis providing the most recent tailwind.

The enormous digital health category in the United States alone represented a $350 billion opportunity in 2019, which McKinsey estimates will grow at least 8% annually through 2024. Digital health companies provide enterprises and consumers with technology-based solutions to improve the patient experience and reduce healthcare costs. Key pillars of the digital health space, including technology-centric primary care, telemedicine, wearable devices, artificial intelligence, and analytics, target a growing audience with large, unmet needs.

While healthcare, like many other industries, is susceptible to the volatility of external factors – whether it be the acceleration due to a global pandemic, or a deceleration due to geopolitical instability and global economic uncertainty – the need for improving healthcare remains constant. There is a huge opportunity for technology and technology-enabled services to continually exert a positive impact on healthcare globally.

The Healthcare Market is Massive and is in Need of Your Help

Market size matters and healthcare is a huge market (Fig. 1). For example, healthcare is the United States’ largest industry – one-fifth of the American economy. To add additional context, the United States healthcare market is five times the size of the global advertising market in which the majority of the major tech companies operate. The American healthcare market could support dozens of FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google)-scale companies, but today only one company of such scale exists (UnitedHealth Group).

Despite the market size, modern technology has limited penetration in healthcare. Many parts of the industry are still largely reliant on paper and fax machines for communication. In the US, $765 billion is wasted annually, with the main driver being human administrative overhead. Lastly and importantly, despite the United States’ spending in healthcare, the country lags behind other developed nations in terms of health outcomes and cost.

In other words, healthcare is a massive market with lots of opportunities to improve patient outcomes while reducing the cost of care.

Total healthcare spending per capita

And life expectency at birth

Fig. 1: Healthcare spending per capita in different markets

Major Catalysts driving Digital Health

• Consumerization of Healthcare

Increasing patient cost share and better technology has contributed toward patients engaging with digital health platforms to better inform their financial and personal health decision-making. Similarly, employers are seeking solutions that help their employees navigate the healthcare landscape.

• Massive COVID-19 Tailwinds

COVID-19 has caused a dramatic shift in consumer and enterprise behavior. Patients, providers, and payers have been forced to rapidly adopt telemedicine and other technology-enabled services as a first line of care. For example, a survey of specialists conducted by GlobalData found that fewer than half of cardiology, gastroenterology, pulmonology, and respiratory specialists used telehealth before COVID-19, but almost 80% embraced the technology during the pandemic. Express Scripts, a large pharmacy benefit manager, noted far greater adoption of digital tools and apps for pharmacies, with a 47% increase in average refills per week via the Accredo mobile app.

• Data Liquidity

The ability to access and utilize data has grown in importance and become the backbone of digital health offerings. Importantly, increased data liquidity allows for more sophisticated analytics, longitudinal patient understanding, and real-time interventions, enabling more coordinated care and efficient outcomes.

• Proven Efficacy, Scalability, and Return on Investment

As healthcare costs and outcomes have become increasingly important with the continued shift to value-based care paradigms, digital health solutions have proven their ability to produce return on investment (ROI) and improve patient outcomes while also utilizing technology infrastructures that are immensely scalable. A review by Becker’s Healthcare found that more than 75% of hospitals and health systems have implemented at least one advanced digital health tool, ranging from virtual care to the use of analytics and artificial intelligence. Similarly, payers have readily adopted digital health platforms to automate activities, such as data processing and collection, which saves 35–40% in administrative and medical costs according to McKinsey.

• Regulation and Reimbursement Mechanisms

Government agencies, who dictate how money and data flow, greatly influence digital health adoption. On the reimbursement front in the United States, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and other government agencies have demonstrated a commitment to digital health and virtual care through telehealth payment policies during the pandemic. On data interoperability, CMS released final data-blocking regulations last year requiring Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors to make patient data more available via application programming interfaces (APIs), unlocking an impediment to innovation.

Technology creating Opportunities across the Healthcare Landscape

Given the tailwinds listed above, there is no shortage of opportunities for solutions in healthcare, whether enterprise- or consumer-focused, including but not limited to:

Enterprise-First Companies

Engagement

At the core of digital health is the ability to engage patients at every point across their healthcare journey. Solutions increasingly incorporate a better understanding of patient behavioral and utilization patterns to enhance user engagement with more convenient and effective modalities. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) have also enabled various digital health companies to fill key gaps for enterprises that are lacking in patient engagement.

Navigation

Several types of companies help patients, health plan members, and/or employees navigate the complexities of the healthcare ecosystem. This category includes digital health program aggregators and marketplaces, benefits navigation platforms, and care guidance tools (e.g., cost transparency, provider search, second opinion, decision support).

Well-being

Well-being solutions continue to gain popularity and adoption as consumers seek to take personal responsibility for their own health. Wellness solutions include nutrition, weight loss, physical activity, and stress management programs sold to employers, health plans, and providers.

Digital Therapeutics

Digital therapeutics are condition-specific health interventions that help an individual manage or reverse their illness. As they continue to prove that they can replicate and often improve upon the outcomes delivered by in-person, on-site health interventions, and in some cases medications, these solutions continue to be rapidly adopted by enterprises.

Mental...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.6.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Technik
• ISBN-10: 3-7583-3437-3 / 3758334373
• ISBN-13: 978-3-7583-3437-5 / 9783758334375