Editor’s Note: Buff Colchagoff is the CEO of RosettaHealth, a cloud-based health messaging and exchange platform. Colchagoff has over 16 years of Health IT experience with large projects, including building the VA’s PHR MyHealtheVet, as operations manager for the Nationwide Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) which grew into the Sequoia Project, the Direct Project. Follow him on Twitter at @BuffColchagoff
You’re the leader of a digital health startup born in 2015, ready, willing, and eager to revolutionize the healthcare industry with your groundbreaking products and/or services. But, fast-forward two short, yet, painful years later, and you find yourself contemplating the meaning of life from your corporate deathbed.
Even as funding has accelerated for digital health startups, a 2015 report from Accenture forecast that half of digital health startups are likely to fail within two years of launch.
So, as your colleagues gather around the office to pay their final respects, you can’t help but reflect on your prognosis, and think about how you arrived at this very point in time. What went wrong?
The leading cause of death among digital health startups is a debilitating, disturbing disease known as data block. Data block obstructs interoperability efforts, and makes the process of getting data out of physician EHRs, or pushing information back into those systems, extremely cumbersome.
For young businesses, this barrier of EHR interoperability into the legacy systems of clients and prospects costs time and money well beyond what startups can endure.
Mobile and digital health startups must confront interoperability and data access issues head-on to accelerate growth – and ensure survival. Let’s take a closer look at data block, and dive into the root cause of this destructive disease.
Data Block: The Disease
Data block is an extremely troubling obstacle for digital health startups. Unfortunately in the healthcare industry, many great ideas falter because of technology, or more specifically, the difficulty in integrating into the legacy systems of customers, prospects, and partners.
As John Sung Kim stated in the same article mentioned above, whether you’re selling to a small doctor’s office, or a regional hospital system, organizations juggle multiple technologies and resulting connections, many of which do not speak to each other. In other words, they lack “data interoperability.”
Historically, gaining access to clinical data has been a major barrier, and becomes more difficult and costly to send and receive information across organizational boundaries. Today, most healthcare organizations rely on a set of heterogeneous systems to help deliver care, and each of these systems will have their own varying degree of capabilities to exchange data.
Even though there have been standards around healthcare IT for decades, the adoption and/or implementation of those standards has been frustratingly slow. This presents a significant challenge for digital health startups – especially when time to market is measured in months, not years.
A Real-Life Data Block Diagnosis
Data block was severely limiting the success of one digital health startup company. They had a new innovative way to provide mobile health encounters to patients via real health providers – but, they needed to get the encounter data back into the providers’ main EHR system. They also had limited…