How the Government is Failing Health Tech Startups and What to Do About It

By SUHAS GONDI As the Senate debated the fate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in Washington this past summer, healthcare was front and center in newspapers and conversations around the country. While insurance coverage and the affordability of care certainly warrant the level of nationwide attention they received, they comprise only one dimension of the systemic deficits in US healthcare: access to care. Meanwhile, the pressing need to reform our broken delivery and payment structures and address the more than $1 trillion of waste in our system was being overlooked by lawmakers in DC. Luckily, on the other side of the country, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists throughout Silicon Valley are paying plenty of attention to opportunities to improve the efficiency of healthcare. In the first quarter of 2017, while policymakers fought about repeal-and-replace, investors poured almost $1.5 billion into digital health startups (mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area). This is on top of over $29 billion invested in healthcare startups between 2010 and 2016. Many of these budding companies are poised to significantly improve the way healthcare is administered and enhance the experience of providers and patients in novel, tech-enabled ways. Unfortunately, in addition to the myriad barriers facing any new startup, healthcare startups also encounter several unique obstacles rooted in policy failures that severely limit their potential to disrupt a system badly in need of disruption. I ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Tech Source Type: blogs