EMERGING FOUNDERS OF DIGITAL HEALTHCARE START-UPS SOARING AHEAD IN TIMES OF CHANGE

Today, the world is more digital, connected and internet-savvy than ever. The development of the first patient portal in 2008 started a wave of the healthcare industry 4.0. The change is already occurring during the global pandemic. For example, telemedicine grew exponentially with more than thirty-six million people using this service in the United States. The patient portal startups are in hopes of improving patient health outcomes by streamlining payments and services. These entrepreneurs and founders are empowering individuals with better and greater access to their electronic health records.

Modern medicine is significantly more advanced. The concept of digital healthcare remains the same: if the patient cannot visit a nearby hospital or clinic, they have an option of remote treatment. What can the healthcare industry do to provide better healthcare? In 2016, Congress passed the twenty-first Century Cures Act. The act aimed to promote testing and innovation in the health industry. In 2019, the United States Department of Health and Human Services introduced new rules indicating health information accessibility for all at zero cost. Bearing this in mind, successful healthcare founders like Alexi Alizadeh, with Adviise – a fully-integrated online platform, provides telemedicine and medical record security to her users.

Startups Without End-to-End Evidence Generation Strategy

Digital Healthcare companies need to amass evidence-specific data to achieve key milestones like regulatory clearance or approval, raising capital, and obtaining insurance reimbursement or payment. One of the most common mistakes that a medicine portal founder makes is to focus on the next milestone and adopting a linear method to evidence generation. This is a costly error that can significantly delay the success of a great platform.

There are far too many startups that did succeed in achieving a regulatory milestone. However, they run out of funding long before generating sufficient evidence to convince customers to purchase their products. This is why it is essential to start discussions quite early with all the relevant stakeholders about the data they require. Let’s consider the Food and Drug Administration’s innovative Payor Communication Task Force. It involves private and public payers such as Medicare and Medicaid, health technology assessment groups, private health plans, and others in the pre-submission process. It also involves a parallel review with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to shorten the time between FDA clearance or approval and other coverage decisions.

Founders of Startups Moving Beyond Limitations

The founders of healthcare are moving beyond the limitations of outdated health systems. They are connecting patients, providers, researchers, insurers and innovators with the valuable information they need. With their help, access to better healthcare is no longer out of reach. Aschkan, founder of the AlemHealth makes radiologists available for everyone. AlemHealth developed a low-cost Artificial Intelligence “radiologist in a box” that connects hospitals, imaging centers, and other radiologists to a global provider network. The platform provides an affordable point of care with Artificial Intelligence.

Kate Ryder, founder of Maven Clinic – a New York telehealth startup – is providing healthcare services to women through easy access using a mobile application. The firm has secured more than $42 million in its venture funding. She offers millennial women access to quality healthcare and personalized health information from professionals. Kate also offers postpartum services to working moms like childcare guides, breast milk shipping and coaching. Today, a survey by Harris Interactive shows that approximately 37% to 43% of women with children take a break from their careers. This is why Kate’s primary target users are the working mothers.

Alexi Alizadeh is the founder of the Adviise Inc., a scheduling and telemedicine startup that offers telemedicine services like booking appointments, storing medical records, hosting telemedicine sessions, and prepaying for medical services. Her experience with the healthcare systems came as a frustrated consumer following a stroke at the age of twenty-two. This led her to develop a platform where people could get access to better healthcare at the right time. The Adviise online platform obviates several ineffective and inefficient steps to streamline clinical and hospital care. In 2020, she launched telemedicine services that users can access to connect with healthcare providers in real-time.

Julota is connecting hospitals to patients and promoting treatments to address health, social needs and wellness. The firm’s platform allows secure sharing of health information in community-based organizations, such as transportation providers, social service organizations, and shelters. It allows them to find patients, perform assessments, identify problems, manage consents, and build cross-sector community-wide healthcare teams.

At Docola, transforming engagement between provider-patient is all about improving patient care. The organization’s responsive online web platform collects necessary content from the provider’s computer, YouTube, mobile phone or Docola’s integrated patient education marketplace. It combines the content into courses to “prescribe” the patients. It then allows the providers to collect patient’s participation data to optimize all clinical and business workflows.

Secure and Efficient Health Portals

If a certain tool, let’s say telemedicine, doesn’t seem suitable to launch, then the most logical place to start a digital medicine platform is EHR – electronic health record. The EHR makes it easy to share data securely. In today’s times, patient portals have become an excellent tool for the convenience and safety of both patients and providers. Both can efficiently use the portal for appointments, communication, prescription refills and sharing of medical records. However, these systems can be tiring to use, as they require doctors to spend hours in front of their screens instead of an outpatient treatment. This is why the founders need to understand the systems they create to maintain a balance. Even today, most of the hospitals share medical data via fax machines. As a result, the information transfers through siloed devices and networks – which delays communication – and the patients seldom get time or care that they rightly deserve.