Lukas Zinnagl – Page 3 – Die Welt der medizinischen Blogs

This Is A Lot – HealthTap Receives $11 Million And Is Growing Strongly

Lukas ZinnaglDecember 6, 2011

We are not the typical scoop-driven health 2.0 news portal, but once in a while we are happy to share some exciting news for startups we apreciate. In this case we’ve just received a press release saying that HealthTap, which we’ve dubbed as a “a giant leap for healthcare“, is receiving the staggering amount of $11 million in a series A round (which basically means it’s the first money not coming from private, but institutional investors such as venture capital firms, but in this case HealthTap already received such funding). Even for the US, this is a lot of money for a service at such an early stage without any obvious – at least to us – business model live on the site. But the team behind HealthTap is great and so is the traction the startup is seeing at the moment. They are claiming that 6.000 physicians and 500 healthcare insitutions , who are verified by the site, have signed up to the site and actively use it. It remains unknown (at least to us – again) if those physicians are being paid for their answers (and time) or if it’s reputation and goodwill. This part of the press […]

From Expert To Patient – Why Medical Knowledge Is Siloed

Lukas ZinnaglNovember 30, 2011

In this post, we will share with you how medical knowledge is generated and distributed and why this has to change.

Help! – The iPod of Remedies

Lukas ZinnaglNovember 15, 2011

We are big fans of aesthetics and beautiful design. By that, we do not only mean better packaging but great design goes way beyond. It’s supposed to be intuitive, straight-forward clear and resamble the actual product or service.

Pharma Should Acquire Software Startups

Lukas ZinnaglOctober 18, 2011

The pharmaceutical industry has been dormant throughout the last decades when it comes to finding new business and sales models. The big ones have been keen on keeping competitors out of their businesses by close surveillance or legal action. In order to sustain and grow their revenue, the pharmaceutical industry has one of the most effective salesforces out there, which is why those companies have been doing really well financially – and still do.

IT, Sonstiges

What is Pharma’s Sales Savior?

Lukas ZinnaglSeptember 14, 2011

We’ve previously reported several times on the interaction between physicians and pharmaceutical companies. We’ve also argued to some extent the model is dead. Pharma reps are expensive and pharma has transitioned into a sales business,…

Switching Careers

Lukas ZinnaglAugust 16, 2011

This is a post somewhat of an extension to a recent one about what it means to be physician – or not be one. The argument is that, there is a bunch of medical doctors out there that would want to switch to a different job, yet it’s really hard to do so. Whenever a physician switches jobs and turns away from the medical profession, the public, the parents, the friends – they all don’t get it. Why would you give up the reputation, a good salary and being paid for saving peoples lives? Indeed, medicine is an honorable and highly respected profession. Now imagine you are in the midst of your residency and decide that you don’t want to pursue a medical career – at lest not a “classical one”. You tell your spouse or best friend and usually they’ll flip out. Interestingly, you won’t see the same irritated faces if you had studied business and wanted to leave accounting or even law and wanted to quit being an attorney – but that’s another matter. People expect you to be working in the field of work you were educated in – and that’s not good. In most European countries […]

IT, Sonstiges

Smoking Just Got Beautiful…and Harmless

Lukas ZinnaglAugust 11, 2011

It’s one of those evenings where you surf the internet, where you click through from site to site, from discovery to discovery with seemingly endless websites out there and then you stop in awe, because you are just happy to see people doing great things around the world. Smoking has lots of negative connotations. Apart from the obvious (negative) health implications, it is much less socially accepted than in the golden days. Now there are great minds out there that see great opportunities, but it’s uncommon that you stumble upon a company that aims to re-invent smoking. “Re-inventing” is somewhat of an oxymoron. It simply doesn’t fit in our minds and seems so wrong especially when it has to do with something that harmful. There are two major reasons why cigarettes (for the sake of simplicity and correlation of worldwide usage let’s leave out pipes, sishas et al.) have been (and still are in some parts of the world) such a tremendously successful product. 1. They are highly addictive 2. They were widely regarded as something “cool” (mostly through the entertainment industy) Being addicted and killing yourself isn’t something worth striving for – being “cool”, however, is for a lot […]

Doctors Know Sh*t

Lukas ZinnaglJuly 25, 2011

OK, this is a controversial headline, but it’s true – to some extent and in regards to certain things. We are not speaking of the medical profession obviosuly but from all these things that you, as a human being in the civilized world are surrounded with. In med school and as a physician you are acting in a walled and exclusive garden. Why “exclusive” and “walled” you might ask, but let us explain this. Do you think the average physician has any clue how the healthcare system really works? In our experience they don’t. Neither in med school, nor in residency you learn how the system is set up. How is the price of a drug being calculated? Who owns the hospital you are working at? Who pays your bills? Obviously there are harsh differences between the US (private) and Europe (public) in terms of these questions but that doesn’t matter for this post. The argument we are posing referrs to the individual, not to the system. The question is, do YOU know anything about the system you are working in? But let’s take a step back. Have you ever learned anything about the economic and legal basics of life […]