spawn many successful companies
To me, the wellness industry today has echoes of the Internet in the 1990s. I’m not thinking of the nutty extremes of the dot-com mania, but the fundamentals. Most of the major predictions about the disruptive impact of the Internet and the Web proved to be true — 10 years later.
The Net’s advance was inevitable, but most people got the timing wrong. They underestimated the time, cost and complexity of getting those technologies — and most important, new ways of doing things — into the mainstream.
And the Internet is basically a regulatory Wild West. Not so with health care and medicine. For an insightful overview of the history of medical innovation and resistance, there is a talk by Dr. David J. Brailer, national health information technology coordinator in the Bush administration and chief executive of Health Evolution Partners, a specialist private equity firm. His firm was host of the California conference; he gave the talk in March at the Galen Institute.
The wellness industry, undoubtedly, will spawn many successful companies. But I suspect that things will unfold more gradually than many people expect.
In an article published Sunday, I wrote about a start-up, Watermark Medical, that seems promising. It offers an at-home device for monitoring sleep apnea and a Web-based service for the diagnoses. If it succeeds, it will be because it understands the complexity of the system it is navigating, including the technology, distribution, business model and reimbursement. In fact, the company founders did not get into the business until the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finally approved reimbursement for at-home testing for sleep apnea in 2008.
That was not true of one of its leading rivals, Sleep Solutions, founded in 1992. It tried for years to get insurers and the government to see the wisdom of at-home sleep tests as an efficient, inexpensive alternative to testing in sleep clinics.
Their efforts were long resisted by physicians who operated sleep clinics, said Dr. Thomas Fogarty, an inventor, investor and surgeon, who developed the original at-home testing device for Sleep Solutions.
