Health Tech – Page 16 – The Health Care Blog

The Finns are coming, the Finns are coming (to Health 2.0!)

Sep 2, 2015

By MATTHEW HOLT

One of the great things that I’ve seen in a couple of decades of watching health tech has been the democratization of technology, and the amazing ideas coming from all across the globe. Health care is no exception and one of the most active regions in health technology has been a tiny European country most people don’t know much about–other than they once had a phone from there on which they played snake. In fact the relative demise of Nokia has been a big boost for tech startups in Finland because it freed up so much technical talent.

Some 100 entrepreneurs, technologists, finance & government types will represent Team Finland at Health 2.0 on oct 4-7. Companies will include the cancer patient communication app NoonaHealthcare, the sleep tracker Beddit, and Jamie Oliver backed You-App, and many, many more. Late last month I interviewed Ilona Lundtsröm, the Executive Director at the Finnish Innovation Fund Tekes to find out more about what was happening in Finland, and why the rest of the world should pay attention.

The Coming Health Tech Disruption

Apr 8, 2015• 38

Mark Cuban has been actively commenting in Saurabh Jha’s THCB post about him. We thought this comment was worthy of being a standalone post (and he agreed)–Matthew Holt

By MARK CUBAN

The tech sector will leave people better off at a lower cost. Moore’s law will have its day. But we are 5 years off from minimal impact. 10 years off from Marginal Impact.

In 20 years we will all look back and think 2015 was a barbaric year of discovery.

To give perspective. We pioneered the Streaming Industry TWENTY YEARS AGO. And now we are finally seeing streaming becoming mainstream as a technology but it still cant scale to handle mega live events.

HealthTech will continue to move forward quickly with lots of small wins. It will slow down when there is an inevitable recession in the next 20 years, then jump again afterwards.

In 30 years our kids/grandkids will ask if its true that there were drugstores where we all bought the same medications , no personalization at all, and there were warnings that the buyer may be the one unlucky schmuck that dies from what used to be called over the counter medication.

We will have to admit that while unfortunate it was true. Which is why “one dose fits all ” medications were outlawed in 2040 🙂

By then hopefully we will have a far better grasp on this math equation we call our bodies.

Of course it will be long before then that we make decisions based on optimizing health rather than trying to reduce risk.

The biggest challenge will be training health care professionals.

Medicine today seems to be in that 1980s phase that tech went through where no one got fired for hiring IBM. So IBM got lots of business because it was the safe choice rather than the best choice.