For the past couple of decades medicine has been stagnant. Not a whole lot of excitement going on. Though technology hasn’t drastically changes since early 2000, insurers and healthcare systems are more willing to adopt it.

In this post I want to point out a few interesting technological advances in medicine. Some of it is hardware but most of it is software based – think AI.

It’s not to say that just because there is a company out there already doing something interesting that you can’t come up with a way of doing it better. I suppose that’s why I write a lot of posts like this – it’s to get your creative juices flowing.

Maybe you won’t go out and start your own company doing something like the stuff below but maybe you’ll find a really interesting gig which you want to be a part of.

1. Blood Pressure Device

Medical devices marketed direct to consumers is becoming popular. Companies are creating all sorts of devices to allow patients to monitor their health at home.

Bold Diagnostics is revolutionizing the way patients check their blood pressure – from the bulky arm or wrist cuff to this sleep thumb device.

With telemedicine blowing up, patients want to be able to have most of the data gathering methods physicians have in their clinics.

Home blood tests and rapid testing is also taking off. Patients can already check for BV, UTI’s, Strep Throat, and Ketones at home.

2. High End Telemedicine

If you have a lot of money and live in China, you may want to have your health managed by some of the best physicians in the US.

Docflight curates a list of some of the best specialists in the US and makes their opinion available to patients in China.

This concept is an important one for entrepreneurs to understand. Even though the average cost of a telemedicine visit is only $50, there are ways to charge multiples of that with the right marketing and a few tweaks.

This is especially important for specialists who can offer their expertise on otherwise very simple cases which require an objective clinica mindset. I’m referring to oncology, orthopedics, cardiology, rheumatology, and gynecology.

3. Individualized Medication Dosing

I might start one patient of at 10mg of Prozac and try all sorts of dosages to eventually settle on 60mg. I may never find out that this patient would most likely benefit from 80mg once a week of Prozac instead of the daily regimen at 60mg.

InsightRx uses nerdy data gathering techniques to figure out optimal dosing for particular medications. This should allow them to predict which dosages are ideal for particular patients.

This is a very scalable business model. They can focus on only one cancer drug or expand it to very specialized antibiotics. They can integrate into the EHR or they can create a tool for clinicians to use separately.

4. Home Cardiac Rehab

A lot of physical therapy and rehab work can be done at home but it still needs to be individualized and the patients often need regular feedback.

Cardiac rehab is very important and can make all the difference post-op. Moving Analytics is creating this kind of service for patients who aren’t able to have cardiac rehab done in a clinical setting.

5. Medical Assessment Device

MouthLab is an on-the-spot medical assessment device which measures all sorts of vitals on a patient including SpO2, EKG, HR, BP, and even does a lung spirometry.

It’s another device marketed to the consumer with a lot of future potential.

6. Telepsych Aggregation

Quartet connects patients with psychologists or psychiatrists either in their area or with those clinicians who do telepsychology or telepsychiatry.

Aggregation services, like this one, are popular and can be helpful when something – like telepsych – becomes too ubiquitous. We don’t have that problem with telepsych yet, but who knows.

There aren’t any good aggravation websites for personal medical devices. Couple that with a drop shipping service and it could be a very lucrative business to own.

7. Happy Employees

When it comes to telepsychology or behavioral coaching, large employers may need such services for their employees. Or maybe a small startup teams needs it to bridge communication gaps.

Joyable intelligently markets to employers and offers coaching and CBT and behavioral help instantly. Their stick is “happier employees”.

8. Missed Diagnoses Models

Remedy Sentinel is trying to catch the disease which are missed by most healthcare systems. They are marketing their services directly to a health group so that more chronic diseases can be diagnosed earlier in order to decrease healthcare delivery costs.

To do this they are using artificial intelligence to predict which patients are likely to have a certain disease and recommend further intervention on those patients.

The Direction of Medicine

Current medical innovations signal the future path of medicine. If more money is being spent on technology then it’s likely that we, as physicians, will be dealing with more data from such technology.

And since data is becoming such a bigger deal, we should expect even more pressure to document things in more detail. Even the phone conversations we have with patients will likely be captured at some point for the purposes of data collection.

Our workups and patient outcomes will be even more scrutinized in the future. Does this mean that we’ll be even more responsible for poor outcomes or will software help us predict higher risk patients and warn us of possible poor outcomes?