Do you know how tech is disrupting the traditional healthcare market? Well, we do, and we have gathered all the information you need to know about this topic in one infographic. Today technology is constantly evolving and starting to take over surprising segments of our lives. The leading health tech accelerators, startups, companies and minds are doing their best to make this industry grow. Every day med tech makes people feel safe and more comfortable, it helps us to have more control over our health and body. We’ve made a research on the biggest challenges of the health tech sector, on global investment in health tech companies, on health tech influencers to follow, on the reasons of health tech industry growth and more interesting stuff.
It didn’t take much time for investors to see the perspectiveness of the health tech sector and to start investing in it. Such companies as Y Combinator, Dreamit Ventures, GE Ventures, Google Ventures, Rock Health and many others started to invest into dozens of health tech startups. At the same time a lot of different governmental programs were established, with the purpose to support health tech development and healthcare innovations. Canada founded a new $20 million Health Technology Innovation Evaluation Fund to support made-in-Ontario technologies. In Australia $4 million Mental Health Innovation Fund supports health tech startups to come up with health-driven innovations fighting with mental illness. At the same time, with $4.5 billion funding from the government, 2015 became the year of digital health for the US.
The biggest challenges of the health tech sector are: difficulty of market entry for new generation drugs; misuse of USB ports can cause medical devices to malfunction; robotic surgery: complications because of insufficient training; and other factors. A lot has been done yet there is still much to accomplish. So the following infographic about health tech and its role in healthcare industry attempts to give you important information in a creative way. We hope you’ll like it.
For all of you info nuts, I discovered a fascinating repository of healthcare trivia facts collaborated by Rock Health.
There’s some pretty terrific and wonderful information here, and some pieces of trivia that I would never have imagined.
For example, this may be a softball, but, think America has got it all? Apparently not. It’s the only wealthy, industrialized nation that doesn’t have a universal health system. Speaking of wealthy, we Americans spend about $8,000 per capita on healthcare. That’s twice the amount of our next closest competition. That’s heavy.
We’re also a heavy nation. Nearly 70 percent of all adults are obese. And as “advanced” as we are in our healthcare, our life expectancy is at about 79 years. That’s 50th globally. Maybe the mortality rate has something to do with the obesity rate.
Perhaps it has something to do with the number of medical error deaths each year: between 50,000 and 100,000.
For those of us in otherwise non-final stages of life, there’s a good chance we’re living with a chronic condition. One in two Americans suffer some form of chronic illness. That’s a lot of pain.
Moving on, what do we spend our healthcare money on? Give yourself a pat on the back if you know some of these figures. Shocking.
Total healthcare dollars spent in 2010 was $2.6 trillion. Nearly all of that is spent on personal care, at $2.2 trillion. No wonder we spend so much time talking about the subject. That’s a lot of dough changing hands. By the way, in case you’re keeping track, the rest of the money was spent on health insurance admin and public health, according to CMS. Thanks to Rock Health for also pointing out that of the $2.2 trillion spent in personal health care expenditures, Medicare and Medicaid finance $525 billion and $400 billion respectively, or more than 40 percent of health care. That’s a lot of public assistance.
If you’re involved with healthcare IT in any matter, you probably already know that 17 percent of our nation’s gross domestic product was spent on healthcare. That’s more than any other developed nation.
Hospital care, physician and other clinical services make up about 51 percent of all health spending at $1.3 trillion, according to CMS, with prescription drugs making up about 10 percent of all health spending ($259B)
More than 30 percent of all healthcare spending is wasted.
How about this one? And don’t shake your head like it’s a shame when you might be part of this problem: 75 percent of all healthcare dollars are spent on patients with one or more chronic conditions, many of which can be prevented including diabetes, obesity, heart disease, lung disease and high blood pressure. You do your part, I’m doing mine.
In the care setting, 35 percent of U.S. hospitals have adopted electronic health records, and 57 percent of office-based physicians have adopted the systems. According to Rock Health, the number of hospitals using health information technology has more than doubled in the last two years, and the number of health IT jobs in the U.S. is expected to increase by 20 percent from 2008 to 2018. Maybe not for PR folks like me, but I wish you the best if you’re in sales, R&D and training and support.
For you mobile folks, and there are a lot of you, perhaps you’ll take comfort knowing that there’s strength in numbers. Apparently, there are more than 104 million folks in the U.S. that own smartphones. Fifty percent are app users and download them regularly. More that 142 million will use them by 2016.
For you doctors, apparently about 84 percent of you use tablets in your daily work. Very mobilely progressive of you.
Now for a little health on the web. More than 80 percent of Internet users, or 59 percent of U.S. adults, look online for health information. About 25 percent of Internet users have consulted online reviews of particular drugs or medical treatments.
And, nothing shocking here, 18 percent of Internet users of adults, have gone online to find others who might have health concerns similar to theirs. People living with chronic and rare conditions are significantly more likely to do this. Who hasn’t done this?
In the land of health IT, innovation is power and those that control it king.
There’s no status quo here. Resting on your laurels, despite all of the industry standardization related to efforts like meaningful use, will get you no where.
As several vendors are discovering that just because they’ve had products in the market for 20 or 30 years doesn’t mean they’ll be in play forever. We’re in the health 2.0 era. Heck, we’re in the era where even the federal government has entered the open source environment.
As such it’s great to see such a resource like Rock Health dedicating itself to the health IT entrepreneur. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you need to do yourself a favor and take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with its site. Then, you need to forward some of the information featured there to all of your entrepreneurial friends.
Not to sound like a commercial for the service, but it’s hard not to since some of the things going on here are pretty incredible. Actually, this is the kind of thing that happens in a country like ours when leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, creative folks, business minds, a little money and some passion mix.
The cocktail that commences is Rock Health.
So, what is Rock Health?
It’s an accelerator exclusively for health start ups providing capital, office space, mentorship and operational support to entrepreneurs working on ideas in health. As a nonprofit, Rock Health looks for product-centric ideas that solve real problems in healthcare; “Products can be in the form of web or mobile apps, services, have a hardware or sensor component, and should be early and pre-VC funding.”
Ideas can be of anything as long as it solves a healthcare problem.
For those start ups bidding to participate in the Rock Health program, the selected start up receives a $100,000 investment offer from a VC group for an ownership of between 5 and 10 percent.
Other great Rock Health offerings (found on its site and free for everyone) include an interactive funding database that provides the public with sources for potential healthcare start up funding; videos that teach the unknowledgable upstarts almost everything they need to know about topics like marketing, creating boards, accounting, HIPAA, fund raising and dealing with the FDA; healthcare event listings; a great start up handbook that provides legal and financial advice (it’s comprehensive and overwhelmingly impressive); and finally, perhaps my favorite bit of information offered: interesting health facts that once learned will impress everyone, including your closest and most cynical friends.
You get the point.
Rock Health is more than an incubator and a disruptor for health IT — established vendor giants should be concerned about efforts like this — it is the future of innovation in the space, and if you haven’t taken notice, you should.