The Next Wave Of Healthcare Innovation: FinTech Vs. Healthcare Covid-19 Crisis Innovation Series
This is the fifth in a series of short articles comparing the Covid-19 crisis in Health care to the monetary crisis in 2008 that led to an industry-shaping boom in FinTech. Find the very first article in the series (“Crisis Causes Development”) here, the second (“The Guilty and the Innocent”) here, the third article (“A Development Timeline”) here and the fourth (“What Might Fail”) here.
Previous posts in this series present the notion that the COVID-19 crisis offers an opportunity for the healthcare market to examine the status quo and invite new development. This can come in the type of a restored cravings for incumbent-startup partnerships, or in the type of energetic financial investment into internal technology and modernization initiatives.
This short article will concentrate on where we are most likely to see spikes in interest within the health care landscape. I prepare for the emergence of development teams in existing health care incumbents, and might go into that in a future short article. But initially, I anticipate we will see startups focus on the following 3 areas, and endeavor capital dollars will follow.
Data Will Power New Applications
Like Plaid and Quovo in FinTech, providing access to and adjustment of tidy information will accelerate the production of myriad new products. The next wave of Healthcare apps will depend upon information pulled from electronic medical records, insurance business, and other firms, which are infamously hard to penetrate. Startups of note: Protect AI Labs, Ribbon Health, and (undoubtedly not a start-up) Google’s Cloud Healthcare API.
Health care From A Distance
The industry was currently moving in this direction … slowly.
Telehealth: One Medical included the ability to chat and video with providers, something I appreciated and deeply missed out on when I left New York and no longer had it. Medical insurance companies and big physician practices have actually started offering telehealth services, however they tend to be clunky and antiquated. Organizations rapidly deployed telehealth capabilities to deal with COVID-19, and now that clients have gotten a taste of the benefit, anticipate to see quick growth here with numerous competitors contending for the recently bigger market share pie. Expect to see new functions like wise symptom checking to come along for the trip. Start-ups of note: Firefly Health, Doxy.me, Buoy Health.
Shipment prescriptions: Pill was another service I missed out on when I left New york city. No requirement to visit a drug store, my prescriptions were provided to my door reliably with a friendly chat interface. PillPack, obtained by Amazon for almost $1 billion, is another popular service more extensively readily available throughout the U.S.
COVID-19 has increased the seriousness to avoid public places, but going to the drug store was never ever a pleasant experience. Shipment drugs, along with everyday items, will end up being more practical and more individualized. Start-ups of note: Mlkmnn, NowRx.
Narrow Medical Scope With Better User Experience
If the healthcare boom tracks with its FinTech equivalent, we can anticipate to see startups that concentrate on one particular area of the clinical or care delivery experience, doubling down on a terrific user experience and promising to alter the future of healthcare.
FinTech parallels may be Betterment and LendingClub. Where banks used to offer financial investment services and lending as part of their bigger suite of services, these business concentrated on one specific piece of an unbundled experienced and put attention into the UX and UI. Healthcare will follow this pattern. Startups of note: Cricket Health, Strive Health, Devoted Health, Virta Health.
This unbundling in the FinTech market lasted the bulk of a years prior to consolidation began once again. This very first begun with more fully grown start-ups obtaining other start-ups, followed by startups including new offerings that began to look extremely close to traditional banking, followed lastly by incumbent partnerships and acquisitions.
My hope is that health systems do not take ten years to begin bringing internal the vital modifications needed in the market. Health care can not be provided in siloes for long, and clients should not require a separate mobile app for every single possible ailment. This is an industry that requires the big players to catch on faster instead of later on to enable a more equitable, patient-friendly, good sense market.
To do this, health care institutions need to focus not just on developing “development teams” or “labs,” however on integrating ingenious thinking into their technology teams and bringing end user voices into the fold.
Start-ups that have the balance sheet to survive this crisis can pull many pages from the FinTech playbook. Healthcare investors can do the exact same.