Health IT has always been an industry dominated by a few vendors, owing to cost, training and switching costs in a regulatorily heavy industry. Even in today’s explosion of interest in AI as a technology of new growth, the market for independently produced tools developed for and sold into hospitals and clinics will continue to only see modest growth. As AI development costs continue to decrease for smaller vendors, this opens up an entirely new space for health startups in consumer facing apps, devices and related services- long been the domain of mental health.
Where do we see the greatest expansion market in the AI era?
Where do we see the greatest expansion market in the AI era?
- Intelligent chatbots for self-managed PHR care plans and care plan extensions
As consumer awareness via the web and lowered costs and availability for wearables continue to grow, and with individual usership of paid health tools like Personal Health Records (PHR) expected to increase by 23% annually into 2030 across over 75 vendor systems in the U.S. alone, supporting apps here are an ideal launchpad for the development of self-managed care. Unlike provider-sourced IT, consumer knowledge and data aggregation tools are not policed for HIPAA compliance. This is usually achieved through a combination of unsupervised AI tools such as chatbots and care plans that can be managed within a patient’s own health record. Examples of these include sleep guidance, individualized exercise and weight management plans, diabetic and nutritional goal plans.
2. Agent systems for self care platforms
In the new design paradigm of consumer empowerment in health, future agent design will migrate from clinical workflow systems to consumer use systems that will be fully charged with health oversight on an individual basis- independent of, and outside of an extension provided through a clinical platform such as Epic’s MyChart. This would include appointment scheduling, Rx compliance, care plan outcomes tracking (as shown above), and even auto-downloads of curated web content specific to the user’s tastes and preferences within a single patient system.
- Extension AI support for new wearables
Wearable device ownership in the U.S. alone is expected to grow by 29% annually through 2030. This lays out a nearly ideal support platform to link population health data with extracted user data to create improved self care plans and guides. This area has already seen phenomenal improvement through consistent, high quality ML training through systems like the Oura Advisor (for the Oura ring product), the Galaxy AI (for the Galaxy ring product), the Whoop Coach (for Whoop, using Open AI)
All of these can be achieved to create an MVP starting point quickly and without extensive clinical verification prior to a beta partner testing period. All in, any single of these tools can be outsourced in tandem safely as a full stack project at a very reasonable price under $100k, and releasable for beta within 3 months.
