I've talked to so many other startup founders. And I've read about yet hundreds more. One thing that everyone has in common: nobody likes fundraising for their company. Naturally so! We all want to focus on building a cool product & making customers happy. And so it goes with us. Time Commitment There is little doubt that we spend WAAAYYYY less time and energy on raising money that most founding teams of startups that are taking the venture funding route [...]
From the beginning of the road, our efforts have been directed at the challenges faced by those delivering care in the ER, and indirectly, their patients. This is a vastly different orientation than many technology startups. (It's instead quite common to develop exciting new technologies, and search for markets that might be interested in that tech.) So what has happened over the time that we've been focusing on "problems plaguing ER workflow," is that we've come up with a single [...]
As detailed in my previous post, QiiQ is at the beginning of a very long and complicated journey. We need more people to help make this happen. Like all startups, we need "doers" - people who will complete some of the sweaty work required in execution. For example, while thousands of hospitals continue to struggle with arcane tools, we need colleagues and partners to actively engage with some of these sites and bring us together in active deployment of better [...]
QiiQ has reached a critical milestone in our journey as a health technology company: we have a first customer. Crozer Health, a unit of Prospect Medical, operates four hospitals in Delaware County, PA. They are facing impending reductions in their employment roster, which may impose even more stress on their already overloaded ERs. They’ve asked for our help. We have been engaged to improve clinical workflow and patient experience by deploying and tuning our flagship product – the QiiQ Assistant. Working [...]
Opinions are a-dime-a-dozen. Anyone who's been around this industry has one about where healthcare information tech is now, and where it's going. Some things no-one would dispute: the healthcare industry consumes a huge bulk of GPD (5%-10% globally; 16% in the USA) it lags behind most other industries in terms of technology it falls further and further back all the time, despite pronouncements of commitment otherwise a very small # of companies have earned the privilege of dominance they also [...]
This is me not putting it off. And it took listening to these two guys battle away on their philosophies to drive me to it. Like many people who feel a compulsion to distribute their views, I've continued to wait for an inspiration. As I listened to Jack Ma and Elon Musk's 2+ year-old one on one, I felt I was not only watching two of the biggest giants having it out, I was also listening to one of the [...]
The gyrations around features and functionality have been damn taxing. Choosing which features to go with have been informed by a huge number of criteria. Some are familiar to any entrepreneur, while some are less common: the hospital approval process (affected by politics, patient safety, regulatory, IT and facilities, and not lastly cost) clinician distrust of administration time/complexity to deploy our own cost of development the existing "faith" in the idea from the workflow experts on our team how difficult [...]
As a CEO who deeply believes that "getting it right" is really really hard, I sometimes have to defend the importance of design. This morning I found myself contemplating that conversation once again. And this time, the designer's talents for empathy and reflection emerged as two key abilities that can make all the difference to a product's appeal. Consider the almost unconscious elements of opening and closing a cupboard door. Designers and engineers have refined the mechanisms that dampen the [...]
The healthcare industry is notoriously resistant to change. Lots has been written about this, so we won't get into it now. I take comfort as I look around at companies that are working hard to reinvent the experience of clinical care for patients around the world. Here are a few who's efforts are worth watching: Augmedix - these guys are taking a revolutionary approach to outsourcing an expensive process. They equip physicians with Google Glass headsets. When the clinician is engaged [...]
Before I started on the QiiQ path, I was warned that achieving traction in healthtech is VERY difficult and takes a lot of patience. One savvy veteran warned that it will inevitably be a "long slog." At QiiQ, we're all of the mind that the work we do now to aim the ship, the greater the probability we'll be successful with our efforts. A common generalization: there are primarily 2 markets for the value we're seeking to build: 1) clinicians 2) administrators [...]
