Healthcare Companies Breaking New Markets

It’s no secret that the healthcare industry is about to undergo a significant transformation. For years healthcare has been done on a kind of “trial and error” basis where drugs were discovered by process of elimination. Although that process has led to some powerful treatments that have extended life, it’s been clear for a while that a better approach - one that actually tries to understand disease processes - is needed.

Now, with the rise of information technology, that better approach may be upon us. Companies from all over the tech and medical sectors are hiring and investing in new technologies that will supercharge health development over the next few years. Just a quick glance at job websites like https://www.staffnurse.com used by health companies to advertise for open positions reveals just how technical the sector has become. Not only are providers looking for people to fill the regular doctor and nurses positions, but they’re also after people who have highly developed technical skills.

With the rise of information technologies and the ability to actually go into the human body and predict which treatments to work, there are many companies that could potentially disrupt the industry. Here are a few of them.

Welltok

Welltok is a company based in Denver that offers regular consumers health software as a service over the cloud. The idea behind the software is to give people the ability to monitor their health, no matter where they are, meaning that it can be streamed either via mobile or over the web. The idea is to quantify health, using data collected by the user as they live their lives. This data can then be fed to intelligent algorithms which can make recommendations to patients. Welltok hopes that their product will find its way into practically every personal mobile device over the coming decade or so as smartphones slowly transform into digital health assistants.

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Investors are also excited by the company because of its promise that it will integrate its services with medical professionals. Not only will AI help people understand how their behaviors are hurting them, but they’ll also provide health data to their doctors who can then check in with them and possibly intervene.

Twin Sails

Twin Sails is trying to get the price of hospital medical equipment down. Hospital medical equipment is good, but for some reason, it seems to have bypassed the cost reductions made in the rest of the electronics sector. Not anymore, though, if Twin Sails has its way. It’s developed a tablet-based hospital EHR solution that it hopes can be used by hospital staff for a fraction of the cost of existing systems.

The idea of the system is to provide a sort of administrative tool for hospital staff that they can use on the go. One of the problems in hospitals at the moment is organization. It’s hard to keep track of what stage each patient is at in the process. Twin Sails hopes that when every member of staff has a tablet connected via the cloud to a synchronized software service, then hospitals will make fewer mistakes in processing patients.

Investors are interested in the tool because of Twin Sail’s promise that it applies to many medical settings. This adaptability could make it a product to watch.

Solera Health

Solera health is one of those rare companies that is disrupting the “preventive medicine” market. The company argues that it is much better to prevent diseases from arising than it is to deal with them once they start. And, of course, they’re right. But how does one go about preventing disease?

At the moment, the best way to prevent diseases from starting is to make lifestyle modifications. But Solera realized that much of what people were being told to do was fragmented and inconsistent. Worse still, much of the advice being doled out by health gurus and the medical profession was generic. In other words, it was a one-size-fits-all approach which might not have been suitable for the majority of people.

Solera has decided to take action according to http://www.beckershospitalreview.com. Not only does its service bring together many different aspects of lifestyle modification, but it also offers personalized recommendations. These personalized recommendations are what has gotten investors very excited. The company says that it can take a person’s personality, feed it through it’s intelligence systems and then give them a suitable program.

The company says that its market could easily top 86 million people at risk of diabetes in the US alone.

Patientory

There are social networks for everybody these days: lawyers, survivalists, and real estate agents. But what about healthcare professionals? That’s where Patientory comes in. The social network sees itself as a kind of Facebook for hospitals. The idea is to help patients and doctors communicate with each other about their conditions in a way that guarantees patient confidentiality.

As such, the entire system is based on the blockchain, a technology that ensures that everybody who uses the platform remains totally anonymous. Patients are able to communicate with medical professionals over the network, as well as other people suffering from similar conditions in a way that is HIPAA compliant.

Part of the appeal of Patientory is the promise that patients will be able to use the platform to learn more about their individual health needs. Like Welltok, it’s educational as well as medical.

Next IT Healthcare

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Next, IT Healthcare is a company on a mission. They want to do away with regular patient-doctor interactions and replace them with patient-bot interactions. The company says that the technology will reduce the enormous communication costs in the medical system where vast amounts of time is spent just listening to people and providing coaching. It is hoped that the new technology will be sophisticated enough to allow patients to ask questions and get meaningful answers that help them understand their predicament. Ultimately, the company wants their technology to be a kind of mentor to patients, offering them advice on how to treat their conditions and saving doctors and the medical system as a whole a lot of time and money.

MedXCom

Clinics and hospitals spend lots of money on administration. Every call they get has to be processed by a human being - and that costs a lot of money. Investors, however, are currently getting excited about a company called MedXCom which claims it has a medical answering service which can process calls after the admin staff has gone home.

The company says that it’s out of hours service can record conversations and then leave notes on the patient’s personal medical records for humans to see when they’re back in the office. What’s more, patient records show up on the patient’s smartphone, meaning that they can see whether any edits have been made. The next day the conversation and the amended records can be examined by the doctor.

Forward

Medical scanning technology and artificial intelligence have come on leaps and bounds in the last five years. Back in 2012, practical artificial intelligence in medicine was still science fiction. But at the start of 2017, it was a reality that was improving almost on a monthly basis.

One of the companies getting behind AI is a startup from San Francisco called Forward. The company wants to use all the new smart technologies now available, including wearables and skin sensors, to help monitor patients while they’re away from the firm’s medical facilities. Every member of Forward has access to six medical exam rooms where they can get a checkup based on the medical data coming from their devices. Investors are excited by the relatively low cost of membership - just $149 a month.