Category: IT

Although happily being located in the heart of Europe, both Franz and I have spent a decent amount of the time in the US and it’s still great to see the innovation coming out of certain areas across the ocean. One of the recent additions on the venture capital, incubator and tech funding game has been Rock Health. A pleasent and transparent alternative to chunky venture capital firms or other institutional investors and a self-proclaimed “seed accelerator for health apps”. The Rock Health approach is clear and understandable for people who are not so fundraising-savvy. The program is dedicated to entrepreneurs who want to build applications or products that are dedicated to solving health-related issues. So if you are a young medical doctor, medical student or any other person who believes in technology and its capability to help improving health, then you should definitively have a look at what the fund offers. At a glance $20,000 startup grant to each team Support from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation and Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Mentorship and workshops from experts in design, health policy, lean startup methodology, financing, and more Office space in Silicon Valley Office hours with startup counsel lawyer Michael Esquivel and legal […]

If you are a practicing physician then it probably already happened to you more than once. Mature and responsible patients tend to google their symptoms, medication and illnesses on the web – a phenomenon commonly referred to as Cyberchondria.

In this post, Thuc Huynh MD describes how she gets an MBA through the American College of Physician Executives and its affiliated Universities. This is a great opportunity for everyone seriously interested in business and healthcare.

There are two types of things that surround the doctor-patient encounter: there is signal and there is noise. By “signal” we refer to things like rapport, relationship, trust, communication, empathy and so forth. By “noise” we mean nuisances like: appointment scheduling, payment, insurance forms, telephone calls, prescriptions, referrals etc. During the signal part, the actual medical problem gets solved. The noise part is the bureaucracy, the necessary evil that comes with the encounter. If you are a startup that’s focusing on how to improve the doctor-patient encounter, a survey of 843 Americans conducted by the communications company Capstrad might be of special interest to you. When asked if they would take advantage of social media tools like Facebook or Twitter if their doctor offered them, only 11% answered yes. Similarly, only 20% would use chat or instant messaging and a mere 31% would use an online forum. On the other hand, 48% would use online bill payment tools, 50% would like to have online access to medical records and 56% would schedule their appointments on the web. As Karen Albritton, Capstrad’s president put it in a press release: It appears consumers are willing to move administrative experiences such as bill […]

A couple of people asked what we mean by a “med-a-thon” and although we’ve referenced the term to the wikipedia listing of “hackathon”…