science to profits

Science to Profits: Blog Archives

Categories & Tags

Accelerator activity-tracking aged care aging Angel investor Artificial intelligence Board of directors Conditions and Diseases Crowd funding crowdfunding Crowdsourcing Digital health Disease economics Entrepreneur Exits FutureMed Health 2.0 Health care Healthcare costs healthcare financing healthcare quality Health insurance Initial public offering invention risk Investment Banks Killer App lean startup LLNL medical device Mergers and acquisitions National health expenditures Opportunities Personalized medicine Preventive medicine Primary care seniors Silicon Valley startups Strategic investor Technology Ultrawideband US market entry Venture capital Watson Web 2.0

Individual Blog Posts

  • Web-based healthtech startups have invention risk. Surprise!

    As readers of this blog know, I am interested in the potential of novel social networking and other internet-age techniques to transform our creaky healthcare system. A particularly intriguing class of startups is using these social techniques to change the behavior of patients in ways that lead to better health. For example, helping people to…

  • Invention risk makes lean science startups different

    A hallmark of new ventures that are based on scientific advances in fields like medical devices, health tech, or cleantech is that they often have invention risk. Frequently they also have market risk. And while the standard venture capital reaction to startups with both market and invention risk is “come back when one of the…

  • Disease economics: COPD and Pneumonia

    Following on from my last post on asthma, here are the economic details for the other two big respiratory disease expense categories: COPD and Pneumonia.

  • Disease economics: Asthma

    Asthma and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) show up as the the fifth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at $60+ Billion / yr. (see footnotes for source etc). As with prior posts in this series, I wanted to see if a deeper analysis of the economics suggested possible interesting business opportunities. And I…

  • Disease economics: Backpain

    I was interested to see that Back problems are the ninth most costly clinical category in US healthcare at almost $40B / yr. I chose back pain as the second in my series on disease economics. Most ($31B) of the costs falling into the back problem category come from a single clinical condition code #205 (Spondylosis; intervertebral disc…

  • Disease economics: heart disease

    I wanted to see what insight I could gain by looking a bit deeper into the economics of specific diseases. I started with heart disease. As in prior posts on disease economics, the data comes from AHRQ (details here and here and at bottom). From my post on disease costs, the big heart disease clinical…

  • Disease cost drill down (1)

    To be actionable, I felt it more useful to look at healthcare costs by specific clinical condition, rather than by the general disease groupings of my last post. Here is the graphic I came up with (excluding mental disease categories for now). The 8 red dots represent clinical condition codes with annual expenditures each in…

  • Disease through the eyes of an accountant

    There has been a lot written recently about how some diseases cost the healthcare system more than others, and the fact that some patients (the sick ones and the old ones) cost more than others. I wanted to learn more about which clinical conditions are the big contributors to our national healthcare bill. So, for the…

  • How Crowdfunding pushes the bounds of what can be funded

    I just backed a new project on Kickstarter that I consider a fascinating experiment. Who knows how well it will work, but if you are interested in how Crowdfunding is changing the landscape of funding early stage ventures, science projects, and projects at the intersection of art and technology, it is worth checking out the Dragon…

  • Pre-existing conditions and the future of US healthcare

    “Pre-existing conditions” are (should be?) at the heart of the debate about the two approaches to reforming healthcare financing on display from our Presidential candidates. I found this article by Avik Roy resonated with me.

Want to Interact?

Get In Touch