Where is the innovation in healthcare? What is the next cool app?

It is a question in every entrepreneur’s mind today in healthcare IT industry. At a recent local Health 2.0 event, I had an opportunity to talk to prominent healthcare industry gurus and entrepreneurs at various stages.  Everybody is passionate about what they want to do and what they are doing. But when it comes to innovation, whatever innovation need to happen, already happened. Rest of it is either following an existing trend or producing small twists and turns.

For those entrepreneurs with deep pockets, healthcare clinical and administrative systems are already matured and taken over by big players in the industry. It doesn’t make sense now to invent a new EHR no matter how great it looks and works. Going through meaningful use compliance is not an easy undertaking. Only play left in this space is Clinical Intelligence. Sure it gives insights to the providers in their own setting to measure outcomes so that their payments are safe. However in order to bring the benefit to the public health overall, we have an issue of a healthcare system that is not interconnected. Providers do not care about connecting to each other, revenue sharing is not a good thing for the bottom line.

Now comes to the betting on consumerism in healthcare. Market is flooded with multitude of healthcare applications in this space, some are pretty cool but within no time, copied by others. Investors are still pumping the entrepreneurs to this crowded market with portals, disease management tools whether they are on the web, tablet and mobile phones or on the wrist. Most entrepreneurs gave up on connecting with EHRs that are walled gardens. Some are looking for opportunities to either connect to some hub or build their own hub of patient data so that they can disseminate the data to the patients in some form or shape.  Patients do not care about their data, doctors and insurance will take care of things.

Perhaps for this industry, we need to forget asking the question “where is the innovation?”, and start finding the answer for those providers and patients who say “why do I care?”