Innovation in Healthcare is not easy
Getting a new idea adopted in healthcare is more challenging than most. The complex relationships between Government, Industry, Doctors, Patients, and Hospitals create a tangled web that stifles innovation better than a world full of Doubting Thomases. This creates a significant barrier to entry and hinders success for innovators and investors alike.
Adopting New Ideas in Healthcare is Difficult too
Institutional, Corporate, Physician Leader, Investment, and Government decision makers don’t have it easy either. In most cases there is no clear evidence which new ideas will become successful. Doctors often won’t use the solutions created and sometimes patients just don’t want to use that whiz-bang great new idea. We all like to think we can pick the winners, but the success rate in healthcare is particularly low and this makes partners and investors less likely to support innovative ideas. As indicated in the Cambridge Associates graph above denoting the precipitous drop in average Internal Rate of Return (IRR) for most VC funds, clearly a better predictive model is needed for picking winners.
How Crowds Can Help
Enter Crowd funding, or more specifically, Crowd Testing. What better way to find out if an idea is good than by asking a few thousand people in healthcare what they think about it? Whether you are a hospital leader, Angel, VC, head of the Pathology Review Panel at NIH, or any Corporate or non-profit grant providing organization, seeing a public, transparent focus group around a concept provides great insight into the future of a proposed innovation. We noticed early on that giant companies, investors, and even government agencies were watching MedStartr projects as a way to “Crowd Test Before they Invest” their corporate resources – sort of like watching Spring Training camp in baseball. MedStartr works so well as a partnership machine because we are a crucible for ideas ready to be tested. Not every idea survives, but those that do are ready to go to the next level. This is why over 100 Partnerships have begun across our platform in a few short months. And while this is working well organically, we and a few of our partners decided to automate and scale up this process. The result is MedStartr’s Corporate Innovation Services and the Crowd-based Challenge platform.
Corporate Challenges and Innovation Services
We want to put spurs to healthcare innovation so we are opening up our challenge platform to enable organizations and institutions, corporations and governments, and even passionate patients and interested individuals to run their own challenges in healthcare. Just pick a reward, set the rules, define some dates, and lets make change happen faster and better than ever.
What is your difficult problem you want solved? What type of innovation are you looking to create? Instead of having your in-house team spend 18 months and 50 Million dollars developing your next world-changing product, why not crowdsource it for one thousandth of that amount and engage your community of customers? Offer a small award and let the crowd decide who wins. The MedStartr Challenge Platform is open and we look forward to learning how we can help drive healthcare innovation faster and better for all.
To Learn how to become a partner of MedStartr or to run a challenge, please call 530.MED.STAR or email Challenges@MedStartr.com.