Startups often being 2 college buddies with a bright idea - healthcare is a tricky one because it can require credentials and legal expertise in the field. It's a lot safer to build a delightful todo app.
I'd look outside of the startup world for healthcare to avoid CRUD apps. Look at bigger players (eg. Siemens), look at bioengineering institutes around your area, look up who your local university's collaborates with, check out who's making the cool machines at your local hospital and go for those :p
If you are going to do healthcare startup, you definitely need people who work in healthcare especially MD. Figure out areas hospitals are losing money and what they are afraid of. Make things that solves that. If you look into Obamacare, you can see a lot of consequences for hospitals/clinics. I'm a nurse and also a designer who happen to be really into tech and have developer friends. Working on developing platform to streamline patient education with a major hospital. Got into it because I was annoyed with how things were done. Thanks for healthcare experience and having other healthcare people on team, I was able to pass through a lot of the politics.
Same here. I've been a developer for years and as I've transitioned jobs I've met a number of really good developers. Any time an idea arises that would make a tempting startup I reach out to people I've worked with to solicit the opportunity to work on it together. Every time I've done so, the inevitable decline always has something to do with healthcare.
Once you're beyond your post-college years and have a wife, and possibly children, the risk of a startup suddenly includes the cost of healthcare and risk of not having any. All of us can make comfortable salaries and have money to take risks on our dreams and be protected from failure by incorporation. But that does not translate to the potential medical issues of yourself or your family which would lead to personal bankruptcy and future employment issues.
I have a friend who's been working on a healthcare-related startup (smart baby mat). When I used to help out, I remember it being quite complex as he's gone to hospitals to help him perform some clinical trials before going to market. If you'd like, I can put you in touch with him.
I knew a guy that wanted to break into health(tech). He made an app where you upload a photo of a poop and rate it on specific parameters so that a physician could make diagnoses.
I hope that counts.
He made bunch of other features but that one was standing out.
Unfortunately making startup in health care takes more than implementing some rules, so guy did not end up running the company - but I have funny story to tell about.
From my experience with a couple health related start-ups, I would suggest that the lack of good health apps has much more to do with the current state of the health care system, and less with entrepreneurs familiarity with healthcare. The main problems that make innovation difficult are:
1) Government regulations - healthcare is and has been an important political issue, and because of this there is a mountain of legislation that must be accounted for when operating in the field.
2) Healthcare bureaucracy - The interlocking relationships and ecosystem of healthcare from Patients to Doctors to Hospitals to Insurance Companies to Government is even difficult for insiders to navigate.
3) Fear of liability/litigation - Healthcare is a scary place for "bleeding" edge technology, and few institutions are willing to be operating there.
Not every startup is a couple of guys working on an iPhone app. Startups have definitely solved big problems. For example:
- Amazon.com, when it was a startup, figured out how to allow you to buy just about any book in print and have it delivered to your home. They had to build or lease warehouses, contract with delivery companies, and do all sorts of things that were not just hacking or technology.
- Apple, when it was a startup (two guys working in a garage) figured out how to design an easy to use personal computer and get it manufactured at an affordable price.
Actually, I'm uncertain about whether I really want the problem of centralized healthcare records to be solved. If it is, it means that my healthcare records could easily fall into the wrong hands (look at how many data breaches there have been at banks, for example).
Based just on this info I'd take the real estate route. Healthcare has bureaucratic constraints that make it a tough world for startups-- at least startups that aren't founded by older people with tons of money and connections.
I've worked for healthcare and education startups. These are very, very hard markets for a startup to tackle. They combine the slow, expensive sales cycle of a large business with the regulation and bureaucracy of essential government services. It's a long, hard slog that most investors won't touch with a ten-foot pole.
Programmers start companies that solve their own problems because they understand those problems. Few programmers understand the problems in health care or education, and it's not a market to screw around in when you don't know what you're doing.
I worked for years for a internet-healthcare startup building a webapp for physician practices, with lots of attention to billing. After a successful IPO, a couple of us have branched out to a new company (http://www.mariahealth.com) trying to improve the user experience of healthcare.
Regulations need to be considered, but a bigger challenge is that many powerful players (e.g. hospitals, health insurance cos.) who you often need to work with and can be risk-averse or capricious with respect to technology and startups. But that situation has improved hugely over the course of the last year or two.
As a result it seems like a good time for startups. Especially in the U.S., but not only there (differences between different countries health systems are often exaggerated). I doubt there's an industry where it's easier to find problems.
"personal project that I believe would make a great business"
You are way too early to think of co-founders yet. What you need to do is to validate your potential market first and see if there is any interest. This will not be easy. It cannot be automated in the beginning. Not to mention that Healthcare and Medicine is a real beast to tackle due to the red tape and regulations that you will have to deal with.
My advice: forget co-founder and find someone well connected in the Healthcare/Medicine industry. Or directly approach your target clients. I am guessing they could be Doctors, Hospitals, Clinics ? Use the initial contact to learn and understand the problems that you think you could solve with your software. Start there.
Fair questions.
A bit of a background first. My co-founders were: an MBA student with a healthcare concentration (Wharton), an MD/PhD student (Columbia), and me, the techie (grad student Columbia). Unfortunately for the start-up (and fortunately for my co-founders), they graduated and moved to Denver (to work at a healthcare company) and San-Francisco (residency), respectively. Although I wanted to continue working on things, with 66% of the founding team away and unwilling to commit to putting in the time, the project is bound to fail. Now, one may argue that I should have continued on my own, which is a fair point to make. However, what I've learned about healthcare is that it's a VERY tough market. It is not because of there exists some crazy technological challenge that the tech world has never seen before, rather because of the people in the industry and the industry's regulations. Physicians and institutions are VERY suspicious of anyone even remotely trying to enter their "domain," and they would thwart any attempt. Our intention was to help them with their workflow, so they could see more patients and thus make more money. When you approach MDs, for the most part, they fear that you may try to replace them (although that was not our intention). It follows with immediate resistance. Also, if you were to get into this domain, you should know that you can't just put up a website in 4 hours and start testing (Snowcolypse!! :-) ). Medicine is so "academic" that people want to run clinical trials, etc. In short, there's a lot of bureaucracy.
Interestingly, I now lead the implementation of the clinical data warehouse at a major medical institution in the US (though I was always a programmer, not a DB or BI guy. Sortta fell into this position). The other week I spoke to the director of the stroke center at a medical institute in Brooklyn NY. A 50-something year old guy, one of the only 1200 stroke experts in the US. Super nice guy, super smart (taught himself python and Fortran to have a common language with the technies and to know when they're trying to pull his leg). He's very much into technology and its applications within medicine (he's trying to push telemedicine to strokes, because every second counts). As he put it, "the problem with healthcare is that the stakeholders think that this is the most complicated domain in the world. People are so arrogant to think nobody has tackled these technological problems before." They, therefore, push off any suggestion for improvement (what worked for Pfizer, BMW, or Goldman Sachs, who have millions of transactions a second, will not work for us!) Same sentiment exists at my current employer.
I realize this is a US-centric view, but since so many startups are US based, i'll present it anyway...
Health and medicine startups are really difficult. Not impossible, but the forces are all stacked against you. I hope and pray some startups can succeed, but the system in the US is set up to perpetuate the broken healthcare system. Sometimes, I feel efficiency and health are almost not a goal.
I realize this is vague, but I've learned this lesson the hard way. I'm on year-3 of a health startup full-time. We actually moved overseas to trail the product in a single-payer nation. The single-payer system offers incentives generally aligned across all parties. In the US, many incentives are antagonistic, making it difficult to sell products. Please the insurer and you piss off the hospital. Please the hospital and you piss off the doctor. Lower costs and you piss off the hospital and doctor. Ect, etc.
It is easy to make products, but difficult to find buyers even when there is obvious value. Perhaps this will change with ACOs. Most successful startups in healthcare I've seen operate on the periphery or actually mold to ease the broken system itself (e.g., Castlight Health)
There are some startups in the health insurance space. What they seem to do is just make it easier to buy/cancel health insurance, all within an app. Some have been quite successful. Some are also trying to bundle in their own health care provision inside the app (like telehealth, virtual mental health, etc), so in a sense getting more people access to care.
It depends on what you think the goal of an app could be. If we can build an app that 1) makes people healthier or 2) actually replaces nurses/doctors/pharmacists, I do think you'll be better off with a better healthcare system.
Just because you don't see startups tackling these things doesn't mean it's not happening. Maybe you just need to look harder...
For your point #1, it's called a PHR (personal health record) and it's been done by many players including many startups, plus Google (who gave up because no one used it) and Microsoft (which still has one).
The problem is NOT the government. (In fact, find podcasts or video of the CTO of HHS Todd Park or the CTO of the USA Aneesh Chopra, and then tell me that it's the government that's holding back health entrepreneurs. Seriously, go google these guys.) The problem in healthcare is the lack of engagement from many consumer/patients plus a private industry reluctant to standardize. The Feds are trying to lead the way. If you're a vet, you can get access your medical records from the VA via their Blue Button initiative, and the government is encouraging other systems to follow (and some have).
Yesterday 1200 people attended a free Health Care Innovation Summit in DC with the heads of HHS and CMS (including Todd and Aneesh) on stage actively supporting healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship. I know because I was there as the CEO of a small health IT company that's solving some of those "big problems." Check out hcidc.org in the coming days for a video archive of the event.
New companies ARE changing healthcare. (That's actually the point of Obamacare!) Check out the many health startups from Blueprint Health, RockHealth, and HealthBox.
In other words go look before you assume that none of us are solving big problems. Not all of us make gamified, location-based, social networking buzzword bingo solutions for mobile.
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