How To Demo Your Startup

This is an article I wish I wrote. It’s about how to demonstrate your startup or business idea to a stranger on the phone or in an audience. Since people pitch me their products (which I enjoy, of course), I see lots of demos every month. At then end of each demo I almost always give advice on how the demo could have gone better and the folks at TechCrunch have captured it quite nicely.

The folks over at Health Content Advisors talk about the business side of online consumer health firms. With big firms like Revolution Health not doing well, it’s getting a little scarier if you don’t have deep pockets to make the advertising model work. As a blogger whose been around the block and online for a while I get lots of new ideas pitched to me from all the various healthcare technology companies and I get excited about new consumer plays but by the time I’ve finished interviewing and talking to the firms about their business models I’m less enamored because many of the firms have no clear path to profitability.

It has been some time since I last wrote about XTS, a rapidly growing virtualization management vendor focused on the Citrix market. In my recent interview with Eric Spiegel, CEO, I found out that XTS has had many important changes this year. On the product side, they launched a new, more powerful version of their analysis and reporting solution and renamed it Introspect for XenApp. Although it’s not designed for it, Introspect is a very useful tool for performing HIPAA compliance checks and audit reports of which users have been accessing specific applications and servers that might contain patient data.

I introduced Phreesia on my blog back in December 2005. I was impressed by the company back then because they took a real problem — improving the patient check-in process — and solved it using some deceptively simple technology that would actually be used. They definitely haven’t rested on their laurels; since then, Phreesia has continued to improve the patient experience. Phreesia remains the Patient Check-in Company but they’re just getting even more deeply embedded within the physician office workflow.

The folks at MyFamilyHealth.com have combined online genealogy, social networking, and basic personal health record management for a single and eminently useful purpose: learning more about your family’s medical history to help improve your own health by better understanding your genetic risks. It will be fascinating to see how people use it over the next few years. I built my own family history account this morning and found these important benefits:

A surgeon friend of mine, who’s been a great proponent of practical healthcare IT solutions, prepared this nice little parody of a fictitious HIT/HIS vendor named Extormity’s press release :-). Here’s what my friend wrote after some bad experiences with a few healthcare IT firms at his hospital: Health care information systems provider Extormity, Inc. (NASDAC:EXTRT) announces a product class action law firms have been developing in concert with Extormity corporate leadership.

TechCrunch posted today about MedPedia: MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School.

When the New England Journal of Medicine speaks, people in clinical circles listen. In the most recent issue of the Journal, in an article entitled “Electronic Health Records in Ambulatory Care — A National Survey of Physicians” the authors report the following results from the survey: Four percent of physicians reported having an extensive, fully functional electronic-records system, and 13% reported having a basic system. In multivariate analyses, primary care physicians and those practicing in large groups, in hospitals or medical centers, and in the western region of the United States were more likely to use electronic health records.

Life hacks are productivity strategies that solve everyday problems — especially problems related to information overload. Joshua Schwimmer, a Physician, recently put together and presented Life Hacks for Doctors (as a slide deck, not a paper). It’s a nice presentation and I recommend all Physicians take a quick glance — it will only take a few minutes to run through it.

Fred Trotter sent out this note to several health IT bloggers recently. Recently slashdot referenced two uninformed comments on Google Health offering. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/23/0520223 The problem here is that HIPAA should NOT cover Google Health or HealthVault. This issue now dominates this debate, and I wanted to specifically point out some of the problems with this thinking. http://www.fredtrotter.com/2008/05/23/in-all-fairness/ Fred does a great deal of wonderful healthcare and IT writing. His latest argument for why HIPAA does not cover Google’s or Microsoft’s PHR offerings makes a lot of sense and is well worth reading.

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