Joshua Liu

Last summer, I reached a fork in the road, where I had to decide between two paths. I had graduated from medical school and was accepted to a residency program. However, 6 months before that, I had co-founded a healthcare startup.

I had a few options. I could pick the startup or the residency. I could also have split my time 50/50. I ultimately decided to focus on the startup full-time.

There were a few reasons for this, but one of the most important ones was impact. Having spent the latter part of my medical training more interested in health system problems and quality improvement, the startup was an opportunity to achieve the impact I ultimately wanted in healthcare in a faster way. So I chose the startup.

Building a startup is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I don’t regret it for a second. I am learning more and improving faster as an individual than I could have imagined. And, of course, I believe the impact we will have is tremendous.

The barriers to launching a startup have dramatically decreased the past few years, and that’s a good thing. However, the explosion of startups and the ensuing popularity runs the risk of people fundamentally misunderstanding the important role startups play for advancing an industry forward, particularly in more traditional industries such as healthcare.

Timing is everything. It’s only because of changes in healthcare funding models, the explosion of wireless/mobile and the shifting culture of quality improvement in medicine that we are finally able to build a successful digital health and startup ecosystem.

However, I still come across people who are resistant to these changes, and through this post I’d like to explain why startups are an integral part of making healthcare better and driving quality improvement.

1. Dissemination of knowledge

One of the best parts of working at a healthcare startup are the incredible people you meet. Many of the leading thought leaders and professionals in healthcare are frustrated by the current system. By building a novel product and working to accelerate advancements in healthcare, the people you want to meet also want to meet you.

On a regular basis, we are meeting, working with and learning from some of the smartest and most talented people in healthcare transformation, from frontline healthcare providers, to C-level executives of hospitals, to architects of Obamacare.

But this isn’t about collecting knowledge for ourselves. Because by nature we want to help healthcare providers everywhere, we are able to take these unique learnings and share them with our healthcare providers we work closely with to make their programs for patients even better.

2. Building scalable innovation

As a startup, we are not naive to think we are the experts of everything. Which is why we work closely with clinical and policy experts to ensure our solutions create value across the continuum of care, for patients, providers and administrators. And we work together to continuously measure and improve the quality of those solutions over time.

One of the ongoing challenges with healthcare innovation is that it often remains fragmented. Despite the desire for better standardization, integration and sharing of best practices in healthcare, individual hospitals don’t always have the incentive, resources or expertise to disseminate their innovations to the rest of the world. And how can you blame them? They are under significant pressure to deliver the highest quality care in their own institution, and that is their first and foremost priority.

However, by our very nature as a startup, we want to make our solutions scalable. We want that continuous improvement to be scalable and self-sustaining too.

So by collaborating with clinical partners and building best practice innovations that we can transplant to providers and patients everywhere, our startup is a vehicle that allows healthcare organizations to have their efforts not only dramatically improve the care of their own patients, but potentially of thousands, if not millions, of patients around the world.

3. Sharing best practices

What are the best ways to excite patients about mobile health? What is the right language to use to communicate with patients and providers? How do you pilot, evaluate and adopt a new mobile health solution in a large hospital system?

As an individual hospital, you can sometimes feel lost navigating this emerging field of digital health and making it work for your patients and providers. And given the fragmentation of the healthcare system, it’s not uncommon for a hospital to attempt learning from scratch – in fact, it’s the norm.

However, as a startup, our experiences working with many hospitals helps us gather better and better answers to those questions. We use that experience data to continuously deliver better and better experiences with each new hospital, and guide them through these sometimes complex processes.

By sharing these best practices, we enable hospitals to avoid re-inventing the wheel and get to delivering outstanding digital health-enabled programs faster. And the collective body of experiences we gather continue to benefit everyone we work with.

Not all healthcare startups look at the world like this, but I think they should. Hospitals and healthcare providers are not simply customers, and startups are not simply vendors.

This is about building a better ecosystem, and leveraging each other’s expertise to make healthcare better.