Online health records is a rapidly growing segment of the health 2.0 world—Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault, WebMD, Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline), and Revolution Health (now part of Waterfront Media), are just a few of the many online platforms that let consumers organize their health records online in a secure portal.
In a space where you are competing with prestigious medical institutions and platforms backed by the largest tech companies in the world, there’s not much room for the small, bootstrapped startup. Unfortunately, miVitals, an Australia-based startup that provides an online storage platform for consumer health records, will be shutting its doors in mid-May due to lack of funding. miVitals, which was primarily financed by angel investors, is a free service that let you store medical records, manage accounts for your family, schedule appointments, and share this information with your health care professionals.
It seems that in the online medical records sector, partnerships with pharmacies, medical professionals, and institutions are key to making the platform efficient and more consumer-friendly. At some point in everyone’s lives, you realize the difficulty (and inefficiency) of getting your records faxed from a health care provider to an insurance company or another doctor. One of the primary virtues of an online database is that it streamlines the sharing process of medical records, and partnerships are key to making this process work. miVitals was lacking in this area; the startup had only developed partnerships with Australia-based medical companies and institutions despite the site’s aim to be an international resource for consumers across the world. Google Health has partnerships with pharmacies (Google Health recently struck a deal with CVS), insurance companies, hospitals and labs to integrate data from medical professionals with consumer information.
HealthVault’s online platform has been integrated with several large medical institutions over the country, including The Mayo Clinic, The Cleveland Clinic, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. And Microsoft has been able to sign in insurance companies-last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Kaiser to offer HealthVault’s health record site service to Kaiser’s members.
With competition coming from Google, Microsoft, WebMD, and more, it can be tough for a smaller competitor to find footing in the space. And the current economic crisis and lack of available funding isn’t helping. Perhaps the death of miVitals a sign that there isn’t room for small startups in the already crowded online medical records market.
Does this apply to the info data services plays out there, i.e. Enclarity?
The services that have DATA on the health care market, but package it for physicians?
Thanks for mentioning us! In this case, Enclarity would not be a competitor at all, but a complementary service that we think adds value to online health records. Our company performs data cleansing, augmentation and integration of healthcare provider data, and many healthcare payers as well as online services use Enclarity as their go-to source for correct and up-to-date provider information for their services. As such, we would never compete with the companies named in the article, but instead, would be a service that we feel makes companies like these more valuable.
Enclarity does not work with physicians per se, but we help the physician community by making sure the information that is used by healthcare payers and online services to pay claims, medical bills and provide information about physicians to consumers is correct. That way, physicians, doctor’s offices, hospitals, etc. get paid more quickly, and consumers benefit from having access to accurate information about a physician’s office address and phone, for example.
We keep our master provider referential database (of over 6.5 million U.S. healthcare providers) up-to-date and accurate through a variety of techniques and technologies we have developed. Having this trusted source of information on healthcare providers can help the institution of online health records more viable.
Electronic online health records services will only be as good as the accuracy of the information they contain. And having correct and up-to-date information about healthcare providers is and will be a critical link in the chain that will make these new services valuable to consumers and the healthcare community alike. Thanks again for mentioning Enclarity!
Got it – thanks for the descriptive response.
I wonder if this has as much to do with privacy concerns as it does with anything else?
After all, I worry about whether the “big boys” would treat my medical information properly, so wouldn’t I have even more reason to be concerned about how a small company handles it?
This isn’t to say that either group will do right by me when it comes to the privacy issue, but there’s dangerous and there’s foolishly dangerous.
Leena Rao said…
With competition coming from Google, Microsoft, WebMD, and more, it can be tough for a smaller competitor to find footing in the space.
I think that there is still huge room for small innovative competitors to emerge and challenge the biggies. The battle ground would be in the domain of medical expert systems and Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS). The biggies haven’t stepped into this domain yet, but I am sure that they will at some stage, but even if they do, what really counts is the accuracy of the system’s recommendation and that will be a defining point of difference.
I agree with fisi, there is still a huge rooms for small innovative competitor to join in the battle field. Specific niche about herbal medicine etc still have a lot of change to grab plenty of customers. If they only have small budget, they should start from the small thing but specific and professional. Thing big, Start small and growth fast,…..!
I had been working on a project of this nature for quite a while…put a lot of time into it but recently scrapped the idea for the reasons you describe. Right or wrong, a bigger company has a lot more credibility, and the partnerships are absolutely key. I didn’t make any headway in trying to get things going in that regard, and was always concerned that I might be wasting my time anyway, since Google and MS are already in the game and a lot further along in terms of forging those partnerships.
I would agree that there probably isn’t much room in this specific space for small startups. I’ve moved on to another idea that may work out better.
Anyway, great post.
We provide include: North America (NAFTA), South American countries, the EU 27 countries, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Russia and other 248 countries and regions in a variety of Customs bill of lading data, import and export trade (Statistics) data. http://www.cust...ms-data.com.cn/ Competitive Intelligence Global Trade System (GT) data contains a large number of buyers and sellers information such as number of transactions prices, both absolute quality so far on any channel (for example, B2B, event, etc.) suppliers and buyers to study the information and products in the the positioning of the global market to provide authoritative and accurate data and reports! http://www.cust.../BELLINGHAM-WA/
PracticeFusion seems to be doing really well with their SaaS, Adobe Flex, no-setup fee solution.
http://cli.gs/1gr2UG
wow seems to be lots of Goliaths in this fight versus the Davids.
but lest we forget, remember who won that matchup….
It is an herculean undertaking to go after the big boys in this field. I also thought about creating an online health records, but as other people said, partnerships are essential in this field, and credibility is the greatest hurdle any startup will have to face.
That’s why a true medical informatics company should not only be comprised of veteran software developers, but experienced medical practicioners as well. Were you thinking about creating this for your own practice?
I thought about it for my practice and others, but the challenges and the fact that the demand is not there made me shelf the idea.
I agree with what some of the people have said in this article. What is essential I think are the partnerships. Perhaps if you had an experienced IT professional to handle the development and maintenance aspect, it would be more feasible. An EMR linked to your MyDocHub website would provided the vital clinical information that would help substatiate a doctors reputation. Just my two cent
Where is the demand coming from?
I dont hear any consumers clamoring for the option to gather all their health data from their doctor(s)–good luck—and enter it into an online record like a data entry clerk. Do you?
And I dont hear any demand from doctors who have no desire to spend a dime or any of their time disrupting current process or record keeping systems.
Looks like the cart is way before the horse here…
I applaud MiVitals for having a go, our American company took 4 years to gain traction and we expect the same here- it will happen and we have the application to do it.
There may not be room for the tethered me-too personal health records, but there is definitely room for startups that come up with innovative applications that interpret data and give you actionable suggestions. It is still a very immature market.