Health 2.0: Breaking Down Barriers to Healthcare Innovation

Creating popular applications and marketing them direct to consumers is relatively easy. Creating healthcare apps and marketing them directly to patients with specific conditions or health concerns poses a few more challenges.

But there's nothing easy about developing technology products for healthcare organizations—in fact, there's a whole long list of barriers standing in the way of innovation.

Some of the country's most innovative healthcare organizations—including nine that are part of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's Beacon Community Program—networked and shared ideas in San Francisco on Sunday with startups and entrepreneurs who are trying to develop the software, platforms, devices, and other products that will help solve challenges from getting patients more engaged in their healthcare to improving clinical quality.

The Sunday event, a kickoff to the fifth annual Health 2.0 conference, included sessions on patient engagement, connected doctors, legal issues, and more. New this year was an "Innovation Exchange," a half-day meeting between nine Beacon communities and a room full of developers held in collaboration with the ONC's Beacon Community Program.

The Beacon Communities at the event represent a significant opportunity for developers: They have an average of about $15 million each in total ONC funding over three years. And while most projects are already underway, some Beacons are considering additional consumer eHealth technology, conference organizers noted.

One major theme that emerged throughout the day and across all sessions is that when it comes to healthcare innovation, the healthcare industry itself is one of the biggest barriers to success. The following are just a few:

Costs: Healthcare organizations are concerned with costs in two ways. First, they're focused on finding ways to reduce costs. Second, they're not willing to invest in solutions that will do that. Developers at the show expressed frustration that the onus is on them to create solutions, but healthcare organizations aren't always willing to share the risk and invest the time necessary to create useful products.

Standards:  From the providers' perspective, healthcare technology products can't just be fun to play with—they must meet specific criteria. They must address a clinical need, reduce costs, be easy for patients and for clinicians to use, and they must be easy to integrate into the complex and ever-changing workflow and organizational operations. That's a tall order for many developers. Those who don't pay attention to their customers' needs won't succeed. 

Evidence: Doctors, in particular, want hard evidence that a new tool will save time and money and improve clinical quality. The healthcare industry is used to an adoption model that begins and ends with research. Developers are clearly struggling to meet that high evidence-based bar.

Laws and regulations: No surprise here that healthcare is a highly-regulated industry—but developers who are new to the healthcare realm often don't understand the extent to which this is true. Let's face it, people who work in healthcare sometimes don't understand HIPAA. And the FDA's promise to step up regulation of healthcare apps is also daunting to developers—and their investors.

Pace: The tech world is used to moving quickly, getting new ideas to market and into consumers' hands (or iPhones) before they're outdated. And as we all know, healthcare is not a nimble industry. Both providers and developers at the conference say the industry must figure out some way to meet in the middle.

Too many choices: There are barriers to even the simplest Health 2.0 products. Conduct a search in the Apple store for "health" or "healthcare" and you'll get an overwhelming number of results. And many of them have few or no reviews. Healthcare apps aren't Farmville—docs don't want to make blind choices on apps that might not be useful.

The folks attending Health 2.0 are fervent in their belief that innovation in healthcare will come from outside of the industry. In fact, there's an argument to be made that innovation must come from outside of the healthcare industry—that fresh eyes and new ideas are the only way to affect change and that the healthcare industry, for the most part, isn't capable of doing it on its own.

Those outsiders are courting healthcare. The question is whether or not they'll ever get past the first date.