- It’s a different world today, one where new laws and new digital technologies are upending the way health care is delivered.
- The Affordable Care Act has led to this shift, and has created a business model that didn’t even really exist five years ago.
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/01/16/google-ventures-says-jp-morgan-health-conference-changing-with-the-times/
But it’s a different world today, one where new laws and new digital technologies are upending the way health care is delivered.
Attendance at the conference has changed to reflect the new reality, as health-insurance companies, software developers, purveyors of big-data analytics and a range of other information technologies have begun to fill out the roster, on the presenters’ stages and in the nearby hotels where the deal-making happens.
“I’ve been coming to this for five years,” said Krishna Yeshwant, a general partner at Google Ventures, which backs a range of health- and health-information startups. “When I started it was all pharma, and all the talk was about disease targets.
“The Affordable Care Act has led to this shift, and has created a business model that didn’t even really exist five years ago. There is all this talk now about analytics, about digital health, health-care delivery. I have [portfolio company CEOs doing information-technology] who ask me, ‘Should I be going to JP Morgan?,’ and I say ‘Yes, you have to be here.’ A few years ago I might have said no.”
This year’s conference not only saw a fireside talk from Acting National Coordinator of Health I.T. Jacob Reider, but presentations from electronic health-record providers like Practice Fusion Inc. and athenahealth Inc.
The conference also featured a standing-room-only panel discussion with startup digital-health companies like medical-information network ShareCare Inc., “digital medicines” company Proteus Digital Health Inc. and big-data analytics company Kyruus Inc., joined by health IT investors Qualcomm Ventures and Thrive Capital. It was the first year digital health had gotten such prominent billing at the conference. JP Morgan organizers declined to comment about trends in conference attendance in recent years.
One provision of federal health reforms ties hospitals’ reimbursement for treatment more closely to patient outcomes than to the volume of patients treated.
Feeling more scrutiny, health-care providers now have an immediate need for the types of software and big-data products that can help them track treatment efficacy and patient progress over large populations of people, Dr. Yeshwant said.
“These kinds of products always made good sense,” he said, “but there was no real financial incentive. Now there is. If you’re not doing this, you’re going to disappear.”
More of a gradual change than an overnight transition, the “outcome-based medicine” provision of health-care reform has drawn a number of new players to the JP Morgan conference, including all of the country’s top health insurance companies and a range of IT providers who want to do business with them and with hospitals, Dr. Yeshwant said.
“Many of these people come because they want to be near the conversation,” he said. “Things are not changing abruptly, but these changes are very big. A lot of people feel the need to be near all of it.”
Google Ventures is backing a number of health information-technology companies, including genomic analysis company Foundation Medicine Inc., big data company DNANexus Inc. and consumer-genetics company 23andMe Inc.
Write to Timothy Hay at timothy.hay@wsj.com.