Blog

09 Feb

Posted at 15:53h in Uncategorized by

For healthcare tech, 2020 was the “most-funded year in history,” witnessing a staggering $21.5 billion, or a 55% increase in investment dollars over the previous year. Gung-ho investors are quite certain that this boon couldn’t possibly lead to a bust – and I’d like to believe them. But we’ve seen these hot-and-heavy romances between investors and startups flame out before, particularly with startups that didn’t have the goods to match the hype (looking at you, Theranos). It is likely that the coming months will expose COVID contortionists, struggling companies with limited to no relevant expertise that bent themselves into knots to appear to offer COVID solutions. When the inevitable headlines start exploding, I hope seasoned investors don’t get distracted by the noise. For many investors, the desire to back a startup in this space was driven by a call to arms in the face of a deadly foe. But even these investors...

14 Jan

Posted at 18:19h in Uncategorized by

Amazon is poised to own healthcare. I’m not the first person to realize this, but as healthcare execs wring their hands and investors speculate about the digital behemoth’s strategy for overhauling a $3.5 trillion mess of an industry, certain startups would be wise to consider what a tech-enabled healthcare takeover could mean to them. Put simply, startups innovating in diagnostics, AI and healthcare delivery could find prime opportunities in Amazon’s healthcare play. (No pun intended.) Amazon has deep pockets. It has enough of the nation’s trust that we continuously let it eavesdrop on our homes. It has detailed information on about 86% of the people in this country. And it has a lock on nearly every aspect of commerce. Its HIPAA-compliant Amazon Alexa device is so ubiquitous and elegant that health industry giants — from Boston Children’s Hospital to Cigna — have launched tools to embedAlexa into the delivery of care. The pandemic...

27 Jan

Posted at 18:59h in Uncategorized by

Your gym isn’t sticky. That might sound like a good thing, but I’m not referring to a sweat-drenched Cybex. Gyms aren’t “sticky” in the behavioral sense of the word. They aren’t engaging. They don’t bring most people joy. And that makes it hard to create a habit that sticks. Very few people are thinking fondly about a health club hours after a workout. Everybody knows they should go to the gym, but hardly anybody wants to. In fact, an oft-quoted statistic suggests that 80 percent of people who join a gym at the start of the year, quit by June. From an individual perspective, an unused gym membership is troubling. Obesity, heart disease and cancer are all on the rise and could all be mitigated by healthier habits. From the perspective of a health insurance company or employer, unused gym memberships are costly. Stickiness matters to payors and employers for two main reasons. One,...

21 Jan

Posted at 06:08h in Uncategorized by

The practice of modern medicine is built on data. In order to prescribe a treatment or recommend a diagnostic service, your doctor has to have confidence that what they are suggesting will likely work. Too often, healthcare startups forget that. In a rush to grow, they go big on the razzle-dazzle without backing their incredible claims with proof. More than $23 billion was spent on healthcare innovations last year, which helps to explain why companies rush to pitch ideas based on fuzzy data — and why investors sometimes buy into the glitz without asking the hard questions. But without data, there is no way to differentiate between a healthcare unicorn and a one-horned goat. Theranos, a blood-testing start-up that was once valued at $9 billion, had been hailed as the Next Big Thing in healthcare. Today, the company’s CEO Elizabeth Holmes is facing a possible 20-year prison sentence and has been charged by the Securities...