The health care revolution will be consumerized
The first time I thought about a revolution coming to an industry was when I saw this NIKE commercial and realized hip-hop and playground hoops were going to change the NBA. The second time was when I saw Dance Dance Revolution are realized consumer tech was coming to health and wellness.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the healthcare space and see a Gil Scott-Heron style revolution coming there as well.
First Round’s investment in Mother Knows is a great example of the disruptive forces I am seeing in health care and I am really excited we are involved in bringing fresh blood and a consumer product midset into the health care space. The Mother Knows team has deep consumer DNA and they are building an elegant solution for a specific customer: new parents. The product closes the information gap between parents and care providers and helps the parents understand their child’s development from the first days. Mother Knows helps track development milestones and manage immunizations, growth charts and general health records. As a subscriber, your child’s medical data becomes actionable, portable and easy to understand — a God send in an emergency and a dramatic improvement in understanding and meeting the day to day needs of your baby.
Back to Gil Scott-Heron, KRS-1/BDP and the NIKE revolution commercial for inspiration…
A revolution is coming to health care, but it will not come from the practitioners or the coordinators or the administrators. The revolution will come from the imagination of patients who create products that will be user tested, iterated and UX optimized. The impending disruption of the gazillion dollar health care market will be consumerized.
The revolution in health care will not be created with words like efficacy or double-blind. It will not come from labs or be funded by big pharma. The revolution will be touched by screens you can touch and pushed by pixels that have been A/B tested and shaped by paper prototypes that make Eric Ries stand-up and say Amen. The health care revolution will be consumerized.
The revolution in health care will not require the entry of social security numbers in triplicate with each visit just so they can be transposed via carbon copy, read into a series of dictations on mini-cassette tapes by doctors and transcribed into digital form by the same person who handed you the form when you showed up 15 minutes early for your doctor who was running 45 minutes late. It will not require pencil and paper or photocopies of insurance cards and the memorization of group numbers and co-pays. The revolution will know who you are and remind you where you have been, what treatment you have had and how you got better. The health care revolution will be consumerized.
The revolution will not be installed on a circa 1995 piece of equipment and rented out for thousands of dollars a night. It will not get processed and printed onto a billing statement to be mailed to your home and then forwarded to your insurance provider only to be rejected and re-submitted over and over. The revolution will be found in an appstore and it will run on your smartphone for free. It will capture data, motivate action and enable the treatment of the causes of disease not the symptoms. The revolution will help us all become consumers of wellness through better behavior and enable patients to walk in and demand that their doctor treat them as a person rather than a set of symptoms. The revolution will be consumerized.
If you are part of this revolution, I would love to learn more about what you are building.