THE DIGITAL HEALTH TRAIN IS LEAVING THE STATION

After a whirlwind week at Cleveland Clinic as a newly minted member of the Startup Health Academy, followed up by demo day with the Xlerate Health Crew, we have a newfound clarity on entrepreneurship in healthcare.

We are, in fact, not alone.

Our incredible homegrown Kentucky team has exponentially grown with the addition of our international networks at Xlerate Health and Startup Health.

We join these entrepreneurs in feeling the privilege of ushering in new business models and creating markets. We just couldn’t stand to keep whining about the status quo. We had to act, each of us using our own talents to their best level.

We are doers, thinkers, tinkerers, problem solvers, hackers, and last but not least, lots of doctors, in a hipster, hacker, hustler dynamic, to quote Dave McClure at 500 Startups.

Then wrap us all up in this incredible StartUp Health force, with a dream team of front men and women, Wall Street gurus, operations forces, and Ivy League connected in areas which can help people torecover from all the pain the moxie maids taskmasters, and it sends chills down any old jaded primary care doctor’s spine.

There might be no problem left unsolved in healthcare here.

In Cleveland, we listened CEO, Dr. Toby Cosgrove, discuss his early vision of doing cardiac surgery a different way, and his trials and tribulations along the way. Disruption always wins in the marketplace.

Forty-five 59-second pitches from StartUp Health companies blasted into the audience, back to back ushered on and off the stage like the best of Broadway productions.

Then we plane-automobiled our way down then back to Louisville, to pitch on our home turf, ushered in by the mayor of Louisville and what seemed like every healthcare CEO within driving radius.  Our peers pitched employer wellness, autism diagnostic imaging, physical therapy automation,  genetic marker discovery and advancement, home care disruption, and then last but not least some crazy entrepreneurs who want to eliminate lifestyle disease in the at-risk Robert Wood Johnson Foundation obese states.  We are two women, by the way, and a hacker.

We were glad to see at the conclusion of our Xlerate pitch, folks clapping and nodding, giving us the affirmation that 90 million people walking around with marginal A1C levels is still not an acceptable status quo.

There was a little “gasp” when we mentioned the $59 Walmart Android, its processor and the ushering in of a digital age of healthcare in 2015.  This is real and it is happening now for our patients.

Get on board. In 2015 the digital health train is leaving the station.

Natalie Hodge, MD, FAAP

CMO/Co-Founder, Personal Medicine Plus

Brandi Harless, MPH

CEO/Co-Founder, Personal Medicine Plus

www.personalmedicineplus.com