How Startups And Providers Can Drive Transformation In Health Care: Best Practices

All technology improvements are iterative. Even the ones that seem like breakthroughs have taken a long time to come to fruition. For startups and providers that want to capitalize on opportunities in the industry and help to drive it forward, here are three things you must do:

Best Practices

• Understand the landscape - Founders and CTOs should always design their systems in such a way that the data is portable or can be made portable with relative ease. It’s much harder to retrofit tech systems to match new standards than it is to design and build them from scratch in a way that ensures that they’re portable and adaptive to standardization.
• Align with the right partners - Especially given the interoperability issues within the industry, startups will generally be more successful if they align themselves with established players (think Google, GE and IBM Watson Health) to help them navigate a technically and politically divided industry landscape.
• Keep your promises - Health care providers and startups can’t forget their most important asset in pursuit of big data breakthroughs -- the trust of their patients. Moreover, now that the value of patient data has been clearly established, it is a target. No data is ever completely secure, and the more that health care data is aggregated into larger and larger pools, the greater the risk that bad actors will gain access to it, either through hacking or nefarious business practices. As such, providers should anonymize patient data whenever possible, obfuscating all but what is absolutely required to develop requisite insights.

The full Forbes article can be viewed at this link.