The healthcare industry is notoriously resistant to change.  Lots has been written about this, so we won’t get into it now.

I take comfort as I look around at companies that are working hard to reinvent the experience of clinical care for patients around the world.  Here are a few who’s efforts are worth watching:

Augmedix – these guys are taking a revolutionary approach to outsourcing an expensive process.  They equip physicians with Google Glass headsets. When the clinician is engaged in a patient encounter, video/audio is streamed from the headset to a remote scribe. This process in turn saves the doctor an enormous amount of time charting themselves.

iBeat – a natural extension of what we have been seeing in the “quantified self” industry (including FitBit). The smartwatch category is in a frenzy now, given how obvious it is that there is a future here. iBeat is fashioned to bridge the consumer world with the clinical world by upping the credibility of the patient data collected via sensors.

Avizia – telemedicine is an inevitability, where healthcare consumers will come to rely on “visiting” their GP or specialists via secure video conference instead of travelling a distance when an in-person encounter is unnecessary. Avizia sees making these virtual encounters cheaper and safer for both patient and physician.

Moxe – this team is stepping into the very complex data waters between the biggest players in the care value chain. Where data security, volume and sophistication is at its most daunting, these guys are vying to step in to power that workflow.  Given we are destined to see data volumes and complexity escalate exponentially, there is no shortage of opportunity for Moxe into the future.

Klara – I’ve talked with countless clinicians who struggle with messaging. One physician mentioned to me that he and his colleagues were happily using a consumer platform to communicate, but the health authority deemed the platform too insecure to use in the hospital setting, so it’s use was banned. Klara is one (of potentially many) who hope to be the prime choice for secure messaging in the clinical setting. There will certainly be a few winners in this category.

Careskore – while these guys also intend on offering messaging services to the clinical sector, their primary offer focuses on performance and predictive analytics based on empirical analysis of patient record data.  This is also a frenzied category, given how many vendors are chasing “big data analytics” in the healthcare industry.  It’ll be a battle for the most robust entrepreneurs and technical teams.

There are so many more startups emerging in the field of health IT innovation.  The net effect of all this effort (combined with the desperation of the healthcare industry in it’s current state) will be exciting change. Let’s see what the next 5 years (and a provocative position of a new presidential administration) brings.

Dave