What is healthcare entrepreneurship?
Healthcare entrepreneurship is the act of creating a product, process, or service that fills a need or introduces a new development in medicine or healthcare delivery. Healthcare innovators can come from a clinical, science, and/or business background, or have a combination in terms of experience and education. Doctors and nurses are often naturally drawn to innovation and entrepreneurship, since they see firsthand the need for a new way to do something, whether that is a process or a medical device.
Areas of healthcare entrepreneurship fall into the following broad categories.
Medical treatments, techniques, devices, and drugs
Antibiotics. Artificial hearts. Statins. Laparoscopic surgery. These treatments have revolutionized modern medicine so completely that people now take them for granted. Healthcare entrepreneurs who develop new medical devices or drugs follow in this tradition. Some recent examples include:
- Antibiotic envelopes: These devices are used to deliver antibiotics around an implant site, such as a cardiac implant.
- Anti-tremor devices: Gloves or cuffs disrupt signals in the brain to reduce tremors due to Parkinson’s disease and other causes.
- Biologics: Cells, blood components, and growth factors are some of the biologics that aid in speeding up the healing process.
- Heart monitoring devices: These devices can warn patients and doctors of heart failure.
- Rescue inhalers: When used, these devices send data to a healthcare provider.
- Stents and valves: Valves, stents, and other devices can eliminate the need for open-heart surgery and improve patient outcomes after other invasive procedures.
- Surgery tracers: These systems can help identify where cancer has spread in the body, such as to the lymph nodes.
Administrative products and services
Administrators in every healthcare organization, from single-physician practices to large hospital systems operating across several states, need tools to manage a vast array of tasks. Healthcare technology entrepreneurs need to be equipped with cutting-edge strategic planning skills to address administrative needs of healthcare providers. Administrative tasks include the following:
- Scheduling: Patient scheduling is a vital component of healthcare administration. Some scheduling software makes use of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to perform patient intake and other scheduling tasks.
- Medicare coding: Proper coding is essential to getting reimbursements from insurance companies and Medicare for physician visits and procedures.
- Patient health records: Electronic health records (EHRs) contain vast amounts of data, much of it regulated by privacy laws. Managing EHRs is a large part of healthcare administration’s responsibilities.
- Finance, billing, accounting, and invoicing: Healthcare finance and accounting software is specifically designed for healthcare administration.
- Medical staff certification and licensing: Ensuring that medical staff are up-to-date on their licensing and certification, as well as continuing professional education, is essential to healthcare administrators.
Consumer devices
Smartwatches and similar consumer devices track people’s health data, including their pulse, heart rate, diet, and exercise. These devices are a ripe area for innovation. Entrepreneurs have developed a number of applications that consumers can use to monitor their own health metrics and share the data with their physicians. One promise of these devices is that the data they collect can be used to identify disease clusters or, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, pinpoint outbreaks. While experts say that these consumer devices raise data privacy concerns, entrepreneurs continue to develop apps to meet the growing demand.
Wearable health technology
Similar to smartwatches, wearable health technology is an area with great potential for new applications. Examples include cardiac and glucose monitors prescribed for health conditions. Healthcare entrepreneurs are creating innovative technologies to revolutionize healthcare delivery solutions to take advantage of the growing interest in these devices. Some innovative healthcare solution examples include:
- Biosensors: Self-adhesive patches collect data to help prevent a cardiac or other adverse event.
- Blood pressure monitors: These devices can take several daily readings and alert the user if their blood pressure rises to dangerous levels. This is a highly competitive niche.
- Glucose monitors: These devices continuously monitor blood sugar levels, giving people with diabetes the ability to better manage their health. Many of these devices now connect to smartwatches for easier use.
- Heart monitors: New heart monitor technology is noninvasive and allows patients to maintain their usual daily routines with minimal fuss.
- Jewelry: Rings and bracelets can be used to gather health metrics. In developing countries, a necklace for infants uses near-field technology to monitor the baby’s health and keep track of necessary vaccinations.
- Smart apparel: Smart shirts and other smart clothing monitor sleep, heart rate, and other metrics to provide health awareness.
Technology, data, and AI
Innovation in technology is exploding across healthcare. Examples include uses of AI and machine learning, big data, blockchain, EHRs, and electronic medical records (EMRs). These technological applications have transformed all aspects of healthcare delivery. They promise to improve care quality and patient safety as well as to advance research.
- Big data: The ocean of data currently being used in numerous healthcare applications continues to drive innovation opportunities for healthcare entrepreneurs. Protecting patient privacy, supporting physician diagnostics, and using data to help eliminate racial and other biases in care are just some of the ways that big data applications can fill a need in healthcare.
- Blockchain: Blockchain is best known for its use in cryptocurrency, but entrepreneurs have developed blockchain applications for healthcare as well. Blockchain uses encryption to store data securely. It can be used to protect patient data in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other regulations. Blockchain is also used in cybersecurity, to protect against hacker attacks and data breaches.
- EHR and EMR: The Affordable Care Act of 2010 led to the shift from paper records to electronic records. EHR refers to patient information that includes identification, address, and medical history. EMR refers to the patient’s chart and physician’s notes. EHR and EMR are meant to be easily shared with other physicians and providers, but because they contain so much patient data, they are highly regulated under HIPAA and Medicare.
- Telemedicine: Doctors were slow to adopt telemedicine for many reasons, citing compensation concerns and the inability to diagnose patients through physical touch, among others. Then, the pandemic happened. There are still barriers to telemedicine, including the lack of broadband in some rural areas. However, it may continue to be a solution as providers seek to lower costs of care, patients with mobility and other issues rely on telemedicine for their healthcare, and the convenience of telemedicine has been noted by patients.
