How Will Future Home Health Care Make Hospital Disappear?
Picture by Abdul Khan on Behance
Our team LUCY in Exponential Innovation course is aiming at providing future home health care solution to prevent people from getting disease. How can we achieve that?
LUCY: Future Home Health Care Solution
LUCY pipeline:
- Natural data collect: data collecting will be combined with and hidden in environment, sensors will be placed in the environment. Without wearable devices bound on body, data collecting process will be natural and engaging.
- Personalized, engaging health care: hospital will not be so important in the future. Health care in near future will not be a consuming behavior instead of being a patient and paying for the treatment.
The first half of our solution is focusing on the remote health data collection. Many companies are doing devices to collect data from our bodies, but they do it in a wrong way: create more and more wearable devices and sell them to customers. For these companies, this is the fastest way to get revenue by selling devices. But for customers, this does not make any sense because the real valuable information is hidden in the data and cannot be gotten without analyzing. I didn't find any promising startup companies focusing on inventing new remote sensors for health because research is risky for startups without enough funding.
The second half of LUCY solution is to analyze data then give personalized and engaging health care solutions. I found an interesting startup company that is promising to be the leader of this area: Welltok.
Welltok - Consumer Health SaaS Startup
Welltok Basic Information
Welltok[1] is a leading consumer health enterprise SaaS company. The core product Welltok provides is a health optimization platform called CaféWell.
This platform provides the full spectrum of capabilities needed to effectively manage health — enabling users to better understand the body situation according to data and precisely target causes through advanced analytics, incorporate programs and resources that are highly relevant, guide users to adapt new behaviors, and recognize and reward individual efforts. The five core functions of CaféWell platform is shown in the following figure:
Figure 1. Five Cores of CaféWell Health Optimization Platform
Business Model Canvas
Welltok Shining Points
- Users are regarded as consumers in stead of patients.
- This expands the area of potential customers. Welltok is not focusing on cure patients after ill, instead to cultivating a healthy lifestyle by analyzing data.
- Personalized solution.
- Personal Health Itinerary® combines consumer information with resources and rewards to create a data-driven, personalized action plan for each and every user.
- Based on the data from specific people, Welltok can give personalized plan for healthy life. This also makes customers feel more engaging.
- Data driven.
- Predictive analytics, data insights and a proprietary consumer database enable precise consumer targeting based on risk, receptivity and impactability.
- Develop user’s living habit by rewarding.
- Instead of just providing health suggestions, Welltok is trying to develop user’s living habit by giving physical rewards.
Welltok Current State and Potential Future
- Funding:
- Till 2016-10: Welltok has already got $163 million investment[2].
- New funding on 2016-12: Welltok grabs $33 million to advance CafeWell population health tool[3].
- Collaborators:
- IBM Watson is the biggest collaborator providing technology support including data analysis based on machine learning and deep learning.
Citations
[1] "Welltok Optimizing Health, Maximizing Rewards | Welltok, Optimizing ....". Accessed 4 Mar. 2017.
[2] "Welltok: SaaS, makes the personal health care cloud platform..." 1 Mar. 2017. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017.
[3] "Healthcare IT startups to watch in 2016: Running list of big news." 20 Dec. 2016. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017.