We need a major policy transformation before any of this gains traction.
Health systems, unless they're also an insurance provider, have no incentive whatsoever to use make sure you're healthy. For as long as we live in a fee-for-service world, the system doesn't care if you get sick repeatedly for as long as you have to pay.
Want to start a successful health IT company? Optimize billing, minimize some penalty from Medicare and Medicate, or identify some population that needs services that can be charged for. Almost no one on the business side of medicine gives a damn to prevention and early-stage disease detection, since it will heavily cut into their bottom line.
Frankly, we don't even need AI to make a lot of progress in this space. There are a lot of simple regression models for preventative care that we could use today to make a decent step forward, but no one cares to implement them in part because implementing the money costs some money and in the end hurts the hospitals bottom line. The only projects with traction are the ones where some federal penalty or reward at stake (e.g. readmissions, sepsis, Obamacare's Accountable Care Organizations.)
I've even seen the head of a surgery department mock a startup pitch with the following: "you realize we make money from those operations you're trying to prevent?"
Frankly, someone needs to start a new hospital system to compete with the entrenched providers, because I doubt incentives for existing providers will change for a looong time. A Kaiser or "health membership" model would seem to be the best fit.
Source: 4 years working in Health IT with a stint in VC.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 12.5 ms ] threadHealth systems, unless they're also an insurance provider, have no incentive whatsoever to use make sure you're healthy. For as long as we live in a fee-for-service world, the system doesn't care if you get sick repeatedly for as long as you have to pay.
Want to start a successful health IT company? Optimize billing, minimize some penalty from Medicare and Medicate, or identify some population that needs services that can be charged for. Almost no one on the business side of medicine gives a damn to prevention and early-stage disease detection, since it will heavily cut into their bottom line.
Frankly, we don't even need AI to make a lot of progress in this space. There are a lot of simple regression models for preventative care that we could use today to make a decent step forward, but no one cares to implement them in part because implementing the money costs some money and in the end hurts the hospitals bottom line. The only projects with traction are the ones where some federal penalty or reward at stake (e.g. readmissions, sepsis, Obamacare's Accountable Care Organizations.)
I've even seen the head of a surgery department mock a startup pitch with the following: "you realize we make money from those operations you're trying to prevent?"
Frankly, someone needs to start a new hospital system to compete with the entrenched providers, because I doubt incentives for existing providers will change for a looong time. A Kaiser or "health membership" model would seem to be the best fit.
Source: 4 years working in Health IT with a stint in VC.