This week I attended Dell’s Innovation Day, targeting the Healthcare Market, and it was a fascinating event. Innovation Day is funded by Dell and Intel, along with other partners, which brings in startups and has them compete in a Shark Tank kind of event.
This showcases their solutions to an audience of people that might want to fund them, gives them visibility to media, and helps drive innovative solutions into a target market, in this case, Healthcare. This was the final competition and the result of three similar events in three different cities in the US where 7 finalists (two from each city and one wild card) could compete for funding for a pilot.
The solutions ran the gamut. Here are some of the highlights.
1) Caring In Place
The Caring in Place solution is targeted at home care givers. This group of people, often made up of relatives of the patent, is often untrained and in dire need of help with regard to how best to deal with their ailing, and often dying, loved one.
The solution aggregates the information they need to do their job better into an easy to use experience. This helps them avoid expensive mistakes, get questions answered timely, and offers a better approach to major decision points. Benefits surround quality of life for both the care given and the patent benefitting from this service and the result should be lower costs to the health insurance provider, as well helping avoid unneeded or wrong procedures and complications that might otherwise result from untrained care.
2) Sii Ventures
Sii Ventures (think of IBM Watson light) is a big data analytics solution that analyzes the information on the patent and the problem, providing the health care professional with a tightly focused, in-depth view of the patent.
Doctors move from patent to patent and, sometimes, can confuse them or simply not have the time to fully research a problem. This solution helps assure the health care professional has, at their fingertips, information on related procedures, available trials that might apply to the patent, and unique information surrounding the patent and problem. It might suggest alterative solutions that could be more viable and affordable to the patent based on their unique needs.
3) Vivify Health
Think of Vivify Health as a mobile app for remote caregivers that assists out-patient programs. This app collects and monitors the things the out-patient must do in order to improve and helps drive the needed behavior, reducing substantially the need to readmit them because their problem has worsened. Using a mobile device with an optimized interface, the solution uniquely targets a need to remain connected with the patent while the patent is remote. The medical staff can monitor progress, be made immediately aware of complications or problems, and more effectively respond so that the patent is far less likely to have to return to the hospital.
4) Blue Marble Game
The Blue Marble Game Company was one of the more interesting presentations. These folks used games to better assure health care professionals remained current with regard to a variety of subjects and that patents remained engaged with the process.
In addition they had games targeted at improving performance both for health professionals and patents by focusing on improving cognitive skills. If you can make learning or adhering to a health regimen fun you can likely improve both the quality of care and the quality of the patent experience. You should also improve the success of the healing effort. Creating a solution engineered against a human specification seems like a far more successful path than more traditional tech-centric solutions, so this pitch was also one of my favorites.
5) RxWiki
RxWiki is, as you would expect, is targeted at pharmacists. It is heavily social media-based and better integrates this important function with both the patent and the rest of the health care industry.
This should both help assure the right medication is prescribed and help prevent both doctor and patient mistakes. It should improve health literacy for both pharmacists and patents over time, which should better assure the process of providing appropriate medication. This service is so popular they are simply unable to keep up with the number of pharmacies trying to sign up. They estimated that if they could scale to demand (they make money off of the prescriptions) they could generate $100M in top line revenue.
6) AnesthesiaOS
AnesthesiaOS is designed to provide the anesthesiologist with enhanced situational awareness. This collects information across a variety of anesthesia machines both real time and historically. This can be connected to patent problems and procedures to both showcase what should be done and to flag any system that varies from standards, assuring both consistence and quality by flagging mistakes before they become critical.
The system can help predict outcomes, help diagnosis, and the result in a far better informed anesthesiologist, better assuring the positive outcome of the procedure. (As a side note, realizing that this class of professional is largely not networked today isn’t making me feel that warm and fuzzy about going to a hospital). You’d think this kind of a solution would be required.
7) Mana Health
Mana Health was the last company presenting and they acted more like a young startup, talking about the folks creating the product and playing to that audience who was watching online. They provide a very simple patent portal that aggregates all of the different pieces of your medical life.
What has often fascinated me is that it often seems easier for strangers to get access to medical information about you – people that shouldn’t have access – than it is for you to get access to your own stuff, and this solution is designed to fix this imbalance. It connects to health monitors like the FitBit, providing an integrated way for you, a loved one (who you want to have access), or a health care provider to get a comprehensive look at your total health situation.
Designed for the State of New York, this is actually the first solution that addresses this problem that looks like it is both comprehensive enough and easy enough for most folks to actually use.
And the Winner Is….
This was a fascinating way for Dell to connect to solutions that used Dell technology to address problems for a relatively small amount of investment and virtually no real risk. Each of these products was already succeeding in market and the firms were looking for funding in order to grow more quickly (and get some extra visibility).
We often chastise older tech firms because they aren’t innovative enough. The way to fix that is to aggressively bring in young firms with new blood and that is what this event is all about. It was fascinating to watch a bunch of companies all do, with a fraction of the resource, what is very hard for a large company to do: come up with creative ideas that actually work.
It wasn’t lost on me that one of these firms’ solutions might save my life one day. For the sponsors this clearly was a lot of bang for their investment buck and for the small companies a big boost from firms that likely wouldn’t have known they existed otherwise.
Oh, and the winning company was AnesthesiaOS. Congrats!