Now that our class is coming to a close, and given the amazing presentations and responses at our final critique last night, I thought this article in the Boston Globe was particularly appropriate.
Entrepreneural spirit just a start to “disrupt” health care – http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/04/25/more-than-entrepreneurial-eagerness-needed-disrupt-health-care/POSS7fv6mBZQPGfhojuO7I/story.html
The article talks about the recent boom in hackathons, accelerators, and showcases specifically relating to health and medicine. There are tons of new startups and products that are coming out with the potential to change medicine, but they are all running into the same problem.
Once you’ve built an app, or built a device, in order to validate it you need to do some sort of pilot study. But it turns out, health startups are finding it extremely hard to find doctors and hospitals willing to work with them on a pilot-study.
The reason isn’t that doctors don’t want change, but it’s because they are already extremely busy people. In almost every field there are dozens of apps claiming and trying to do the same thing. So in an extremely limited time resources setting it becomes very hard for doctors to decide whose product they should pilot.
Not only that but hospital systems are extremely bureaucratic, institutional review board approvals can be hard to come by, and clinical trials can often costs startups easily between 50 – 100k!
All of that made me realize how lucky we are in our medicine in media class to have problem owners who are so invested in the products and teams. We don’t have to struggle to find a physician partner, because we already have an in-built one.
Creating a medical product is far from an easy pathway, but since all of us are lucky to have one of the biggest obstacles in our path cleared, I hope to see several of our innovations in the real world in the near future.