Ask HN: Why aren't more people doing stuff in the healthcare space?
I see a lot of discussion around shiny new picture sharing apps and cutesy social networking sites but almost nothing on here about anyone doing anything related to healthcare. Healthcare spending in the US is 15.2% of GDP, roughly 2.5 trillion dollars. That is a lot of money sloshing around in just one sector of the economy. HHS under the leadership of CTO Todd Park has a treasure trove of data that they've been opening up over the last 2 years to all comers for the taking via healthdata.gov - a kind of open health data platform which in theory can be used to feed data to commercial sites and applications.
Some of the big(costly) problems in healthcare include reducing patient readmissions (Medicare is getting ready to penalize hospitals for up to 280 million dollars for high readmit rates come Oct), managing inpatient and ER utilization by being able to predict rising trends so that measures of intervention can be taken. Preventive healthcare aided by the use of mobile health monitors that automatically track and log personal health metrics is another big opportunity and will likely be the biggest revolution in healthcare in over a century if it takes hold.
I am just a little surprised there is not more discussion around here on healthcare related startups. The problems are big but so are the opportunities. I work on the analytics side for a healthcare MCO and see the challenges and issues daily.
Some of the big(costly) problems in healthcare include reducing patient readmissions (Medicare is getting ready to penalize hospitals for up to 280 million dollars for high readmit rates come Oct), managing inpatient and ER utilization by being able to predict rising trends so that measures of intervention can be taken. Preventive healthcare aided by the use of mobile health monitors that automatically track and log personal health metrics is another big opportunity and will likely be the biggest revolution in healthcare in over a century if it takes hold.
I am just a little surprised there is not more discussion around here on healthcare related startups. The problems are big but so are the opportunities. I work on the analytics side for a healthcare MCO and see the challenges and issues daily.