GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers
Health entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity using scarce resources under conditions of uncertainty. The goal is to create user defined value through the deployment of health innovation using a VAST business model. Those who embrace the entrepreneurial mindset and practice entrepreneurial habits hold the keys to the kingdom when it comes to improved sick care and health outcomes. In fact, it is unlikely that any independent practitioner or group can survive, let alone thrive,without moving to an entrepreneurial role from a being a knowledge technician. That does not mean you have to start a company. It means that everything you do has to create user defined value. No move should be wasted.
The space between the data and the doctor is being filled quickly with navigators, advocates and “infomediaries”. As responsibility for health outcomes increasingly shifts from doctors to patients, they become, in a sense, patient entrepreneurs, in possession of an asset-their data- creating value (better disease management and prevention) through the deployment and adoption of innovation. The result will be more DIY medicine and all that goes with it.
Think of APIs as tunnels into the clinical data warehouses that have been created by EHRs. Think of third parties as new and existing IT powerhouses — including the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Google — that have been authorized by patients to act as data stewards on their behalf.
We are not only democratizing care. We are democratizing and decentralizing value creation and funding. We are creating prosumers and accidental entrepreneurs.
What the result will be is anybody’s guess, but what is clear is that the rules, ecosystems, business models and technologies are inevitably facilitating more patient involvement, engagement and responsibility.
Amedzon has recently announced a service that will allow AI based algorithms to be applied to EMR data. Would you charge someone a fee to do that and place restrictions on its use if you owned your data?
Silicon Valley startup Open Health Network, which develops AI-based applications for healthcare organizations like UCSF, Sanofi and Cornell University has launched a new product meant to use blockchain technology to allow patients to manage and monetize their medical data. If successful patients will be able to sell their assets on the PDX. a NASDAQ for patient data.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has proposed a streamlined set of 15 core measures that they say represent the most vital signs for tracking progress toward improved health and healthcare in the United States.
They are:
- Life expectancy
- Well-being
- Overweight and obesity
- Addictive behavior
- Unintended pregnancy
- Healthy communities
- Preventive services
- Care access
- Patient safety
- Evidence-based care
- Care match with patient goals
- Personal spending burden
- Population spending burden
- Individual engagement
- Community engagement
Like all entrepreneurs, to succeed in sick care entrepreneurship, patients will need education, resources (low interest loans or seed stage funding), networks (connected to sick care professionals to inform their thinking and design), mentors, experience and peer to peer support. While is it nice to see more and more health professionals and educators embracing biomedical innovation and entrepreneurship, most patients are still standing on the sidelines or recovering in the ICU. However, things are changing and we need to remove the barriers to patient entrepreneurship so they can, like health professionals, get their ideas to other patients.
Apple has changed the game with HealthKit expanding how we do human genotyping and how we do clinical trials. My Retina Tracker, an online registry for patients with retina diseases to store their medial records and provide anonymous data to researchers.
The monetary value of information about a single person’s online and offline activity may reach $10 a month by 2025 in the U.S. For further insights, read “Tomorrow’s Data Heroes.”
Is it unlikely that we will be able to move the needle on most of these without the involvement of patient entrepreneurs , patient scientists and doctors assuming more of their traditional role as teachers, not just healers. Remember, docere is the Latin word for teacher and don’t forget those pediatric patient entrepreneurs.
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