Why Startups Are an Important Part of Healthcare Industry Innovations

Scientists and doctors are constantly innovating to find new and better ways to learn about, treat, or even cure ailments or diseases that affect us. There will always be a newer, possibly better solution on the horizon.

However, innovations in healthcare shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, it’s important that we don’t think of innovations in health care as expected or able to be achieved with the same players, but rather, encourage those willing to find new solutions to do so.

Startups have been part of healthcare innovations for decades. It’s important that they remain part of the conversation, and that we encourage smaller, nimbler organizations to continue to innovate in the ways that they do best.  After all, the spirit of the startup is to re-think and embrace their disruptive nature to challenge norms and seek more efficient and higher quality outcomes.  It makes sense as the healthcare industry is poised to confront many challenges, even in the face of COVID, that startups become a valid and vital part of the industry conversations and movements.

Here are just a few reasons that startups are an important part of healthcare industry innovations.

 

1. Startups’ speed enables them to find solutions faster.

Startups are agile and able to come up with innovative solutions much quicker than established companies with more stakeholders who may take longer to approve go-ahead on projects. Further, startups are able to specialize in ultra-specific areas opposed to established companies that may not be able to dedicate time or personnel to specific issues.

Especially in a year like this one, when our healthcare system isn’t set up to handle a pandemic — let alone a disease that we’ve never seen or dealt with before — the industry has to move quickly with whatever information it has. The healthcare industry’s biggest players may not have the bandwidth to deal with massive crises like these, but startups can, and have, raced to find solutions.

 

2. We need more perspectives to make sure health care solutions work for everyone.

It wasn’t required for government-funded clinical trials to include women or minorities in their studies until the 1990s. This meant that women could be prescribed medications that affected them differently than men, with sometimes devastating effects.  Similarly, medical screenings rely on machine learning data sets, and when those data sets only include or mostly include lighter skin tones, minority patients’ health issues such as skin cancer can go undetected.

Bias is an unfortunate reality in medical research, and needs to be addressed in order to improve data, and help everyone lead healthy lives. It’s important that we make sure research includes diverse perspectives and data, and to do so, as an industry, we have to support the organizations making that possible.

3. Innovation is a common goal.

Bigger players in the industry don’t see startups as a threat, either, but rather key to a successful future, for the industry and for patients everywhere. According to Jeff Semenchuk, CIO of Blue Shield of California, revisioning health care services in America is part of startups’ role.

According to Semenchuk, the goal is not to continue doing things the same way in the healthcare system as we know it today, but rather, to reimagine health care services in America. Startups have a big role to play in that, and Blue Shield of California, he explains, is investing in startups to make sure they help enable that change and get to see it play out first-hand.