Even in regions where health care delivery mechanisms are abundant, demand can be overwhelming and other health care operational challenges can hinder patient outcomes.
As digital transformation in healthcare lags behind other industries, and value-based care drives provider efficiency while governments invest in healthcare cost savings and access measures, healthcare technology is decidedly overripe for disruption.
“The companies and startups that solve healthcare customer challenges ultimately improve the ecosystem in meaningful ways by making it easy to buy, deploy and use technology,” said Sally Frank, global head of health and life sciences at Microsoft for Startups.
For her HIMSS24 Views from the Top Session, Digital health startups: Harnessing innovation to disrupt and improve healthcare deliveryFrank said Healthcare IT news how the conversation can give participants insight into how successful startups drive investments and how unicorns grow and scale.
She is joined by leaders from two startups at opposite ends of the growth trajectory, as well as voices from a digitally savvy healthcare system and experienced financier:
- Abhinav Shashank, CEO and co-founder of Innovaccer.
- Mary Beth Chalk, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at BeeKeeperAI.
- Robbie Freeman, digital experience and director of nursing informatics at Mount Sinai.
- Michael Greeley, co-founder and general partner at Flare Capital Partners.
“Their individual perspectives, as well as their ability to bounce off each other, is what I find most exciting about the session,” she said.
Separating the wheat from the chaff
“A true market maker looks at the ecosystem and where they fit into it,” Frank said, noting that they get an edge when they look at the often overlooked pain points.
“They understand their customers and don’t want to completely disrupt the workflow.”
Shashank, after whom it was named Forbes’ 30 Under 30 2017: Enterprise Asiaand the company he co-founded launched a unified patient record as a proprietary model in 2020, which collects patient data from healthcare and delivers it to care teams.
Shortly afterwards, the now Unicorn-status startup unveiled its FHIR-compatible Data Activation Platform. FHIR – which is promoted in the 21st Century Cures Act as the foundational standard to support healthcare data sharing – is still an issue to be addressed on the government’s interoperability roadmap.
Last year, Innovaccer leveraged generative artificial intelligence – which Frank said is the technology that will have the biggest transformative impact in the coming years – and launched the genAI assistant Sara. The company recently fully acquired Cured, a digital marketing and customer relationship management platform.
“I think it has become a rallying cry that AI copilots will help doctors, but not overtake them,” Frank said. “No amount of analysis or anything else will replace the keen eye of a doctor,” she noted.
BeekeeperAI, which will be part of the Microsoft booth and part of Frank’s Pegasus portfolio of startups, uses an “Azure confidential ledger to create an immutable record of AI/machine learning artifacts from compute cycles,” explains Chalk out on LinkedIn.
The company’s zero trust platform encrypts protected data at rest, in transit, and as it is processed by algorithms to accelerate AI adoption in healthcare. In late 2020, the University of California San Francisco and partners including Microsoft began developing the platform to reduce the time and costs associated with creating safe, clinical-grade AI algorithms.
At the time, UCSF said the BeeKeeperAI platform would accelerate clinical algorithm development from 30 months to one day.
Market makers – such as Innovaccer and BeekeeperAI – “are solving a problem that people are at least willing to pay for,” Frank explains.
They also need to be integrated with existing health care systems, have “a strong, well-articulated, meaningful value proposition” and understand the regulatory pathway, she added.
“Because we all know our providers are overwhelmed, they don’t need another system, so point solutions are not ideal.”
What works, and what doesn’t
At HIMSS24, those who are already in the throes of their startup and starting to scale can hear from Shashank about what that looks like, Frank said.
For example, “How do you make decisions to really scale in a massive way so that you go from $20 million or $50 million to a billion dollars in valuation?” she suggested.
Session participants will also get Freeman’s insights on healthcare customer mindsets, while Greeley, who has funded companies at the BeekeeperAI stage and others like Innovaccer that have achieved unicorn status, can advise on what the due diligence process looks like sees. Frank noted that he is an expert on what separates the startups that get funded and those that don’t.
“It’s the diversity of perspectives from the journeys they’ve been on and what they’ve seen that has worked and what hasn’t worked,” Frank said.
The HIMSS24 Views From The Top session, “Digital Health startups: Harnessing Innovation to Disrupt and Improve Care Delivery,” is scheduled for March 12 from noon to 1 p.m. in room W224E. More information and registration.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.