Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Bob Crimmins
[Marcelo’s Note: Two days ago I blogged about all the healthcare startups in Seattle. Bob Crimmins wrote an excellent comment and I asked him to convert it to a blog post]
Spring boarding off of Marcelo’s salient post about the apparent abundance of healthcare startups in Seattle, I wanted to add a few observations. Speaking as one of the founders of iMedExchange (a social network exclusively for physicians), I and my fellow comrades have been watching this space actively for a few years. Here are some thought about why healthcare, why Seattle and why now.
Why Healthcare? At $2 trillion dollars and growing, the US healthcare industry is the single largest non-military market on the planet. It’s also one of the most complex and one of the most broken industries. In terms of administrative technology (as opposed to clinical tech) the healthcare industry has lagged virtually every other industry of any significance. In fact, despite endless studies that purport to show that electronic medical records systems reduce costs, reduce mistakes and generally improve the quality of care, the rate of adoption remains glacial. Add to the mix a broad movement toward consumer-directed healthcare, a kludgey claim reimbursement process, government mandates, regulatory compliance issues, the fact that everyone, everywhere needs it all the time, recession or not, and about a hundred other factors and it’s easy to see why healthcare is an attractive industry — lots of opportunities.
Why now? An obvious factor is an aging population — which means many more sick people along with lots of new opportunities to treat them… and sell them a ton of stuff. But, actually, it’s not really a “now” thing… unless “now” covers the last hand full of years. There have been a truck load of healthcare startups coming out of Seattle for at least the last half dozen years, including OneHealthPort, MedOrder, ClearMed, OnHealth (acquired by WebMD), PracticePartner, TransVerio, 3DGrid Healthcare Solutions, and a bunch of others that I can’t quite recall at the moment — some have come and gone. A couple of more recent forays not on your list are Clarity Health and PeerWisdom.
As for why Seattle? I’m not sure, actually. There are some significant healthcare related players up here, including Harbor View, Seattle Cancer Center, Frazier Health Ventures, WellPoint, even Overlake Hospital has a venture fund. Combined with the tech influence of Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon and others I suppose it’s a pretty rich target environment. I also suspect that other major technical market might also be hot beds of healthcare startups, e.g., New Your, San Francisco, Boston, etc.
As for us over at iMedExchange, we’re taking a different tact from the vast majority of healthcare startups. While most healthcare startups are go after clinical information management or chasing the healthcare consumer, we’re focused on the doctors as people. By providing a value add social networking context for doctors to connect we’re aiming to build the most useful place on the Web for physicians.
Good luck to all the Seattle startups out there, healthcare or otherwise!!
—-
Bob Crimmins is the Founder and CTO of iMedExchange.
