What is the future of healthcare we aspire to?
If you are in the healthcare space, let's chat!
Instead of waiting for hours at a clinic, what if we get an Uber-like time estimation, which gives us more accurate wait times and tells us how many patients are ahead of us in the queue?
Instead of repeating our medical history and undergoing duplicated tests, what if we have a Google Drive for medical records, which allows seamless yet secure sharing of information between different healthcare providers?
Instead of being surprised by our medical bills, what if we could see the prices upfront and across different providers, just like when we shop on Amazon?
Instead of being confused by our diagnosis, what if we can watch a series of curated or personalized videos that explain our condition and treatment plan in simple terms—hopefully as entertaining as Netflix content?
Instead of lying on a hospital bed and having a nurse come check on us every few hours, what if we could be monitored remotely at home and receive care from nearby community health nurses if required?
Some people might look at these and chuckle, “You are so naive. These are impossible.” Yes, the healthcare system is complex and there might be good reasons why these solutions don’t exist yet. Despite that, companies around the world are relentlessly making progress towards a better future.
Qure4u allows clinics to show expected wait times so that patients can go to the clinic with their preferred wait times. Health Gorilla enables healthcare providers to securely exchange medical records for better diagnoses and treatments. Turquoise Health lets you compare prices for procedures while GoodRx does that for prescription drugs. Get Well provides 300+ care plans, which include assigned educational content. Doccla is a virtual hospital that provides remote monitoring for a wide range of measurements and teleconsultation, if necessary.
When we think about healthcare, it is often negative. Painful jabs. Bitter pills. Prolonged waits. The looming uncertainty of test results. The anxiety of diagnoses. But there’s so much potential to improve the experience.
Receiving treatments is more than harrowing enough; can we reduce the wait times, administrative burden, fragmented care, and other inefficiencies that patients have to deal with?
Instead of simply managing illness and frailty, can we put more emphasis on prevention and empowerment, given chronic diseases are more prevalent than acute conditions?
With new technologies, especially AI, can we provide better care both for the patients, and the ever overworked healthcare professionals serving them?
Venturing into the healthcare space
Hello there! If you don’t know us, we are Alfred and Swee Kiat. We are the founders of Pebblely (AI product photography), Dashibase (Notion-like internal tool builder), and several other products. Over a million people around the world have used our products to solve their problems.
We want to make the same impact on healthcare.
Healthcare is a critical component of our society. It deals with life and death. And pain. But despite its importance, it seems to be burdened by challenges. Hospitals are always understaffed, and healthcare professionals are always overworked. Patients don’t get the care and outcomes they need. As technologists, we cannot help but wonder what optimistic, futuristic healthcare looks like.
Besides building our startup for the past two years, Swee Kiat and I have been working on software for almost a decade. Swee Kiat used to be a privacy engineer at Google, collaborated with people at OpenAI and Meta on AI research, and worked as a full-stack developer at various AI startups. I (Alfred) helped software businesses like Buffer and ReferralCandy grow through marketing, education, and product development, and ran several internet businesses on the side. Yes, we do not have direct healthcare experience. But we think that can be an advantage, where we are able to question things with fresh eyes, unburdened by ingrained norms.
We are not going into this with blind optimism and ignorance too. To make up for our inexperience, we have a network of friends in the healthcare space who have been helping us understand the nuances and hidden intricacies of the healthcare system. My wife is also a doctor. (But we have a lot more to learn and would love to speak to more people; more below!)
Also, the Singapore healthcare system is forward-thinking, which makes us optimistic about being able to contribute to the future of healthcare here (for a start and eventually globally). For example, Synapxe and the Ministry of Health created AI Medical Imaging Platform for Singapore Public Healthcare (AimSG), an “app store” for the use of AI by medical imaging professionals. AimSG has enabled health tech companies like Lunit to integrate their AI imaging solutions into existing clinical workflows at Singapore General Hospital and Changi General Hospital.
Taking notes for future healthcare players
Almost everyone we have spoken to cautioned us about building a healthcare startup. It’s like playing the startup game on hard mode. It’s unlike Pebblely where we could build an app, share on social media, and watch customers come in. Healthcare is a complex system with regulations, compliance, complex procurement processes, multiple stakeholders, long decision-making, and unpredictable emergent behavior. Things that can easily crush a startup.
To be honest, we are not even thinking about building a healthcare startup—at least not yet. Our top priority now is to understand the healthcare space. As outsiders to the healthcare space, we have more questions than answers.
What are the problems in healthcare?
Why are the problems the way they are?
What have been tried, and why didn’t the solutions work?
How can we help solve the problems?
For example, naively, we question, why don’t all patients have continuous vital monitoring to detect deteriorating conditions in time? Is it because of the cost? Or nurses are just too busy to deal with even more information? Or some legacy issues?
This is why we are starting with this journal. Rather than ignorantly building something no healthcare professionals would want to use, we want to talk to them, understand their challenges, and document our findings.
In the best-case scenario, we have a chance to create a healthcare startup solving critical healthcare issues. In the worst? We would have left notes for future players navigating this meaningful yet daunting industry.
Help write healthcare’s next chapter
So far, we have spoken to emergency doctors, radiologists, nurses, professors, policy planners, and startup founders. We want to speak to more people in the healthcare space and go deeper into a handful of promising areas.
Here are the areas we have been looking into and people we would love to learn from:
Remote patient monitoring: Patients with monitoring at home, private nurses who work with remote monitoring, and people working in nursing homes
Data integration and analytics: Administrators, project managers, and engineers building data pipelines and integrations, nurses and doctors who rely on such analytics
Radiology imaging software: Radiologists, radiographers, and anyone who works with medical imaging
Clinic administrations and operations: Private GPs, especially solo practitioners, clinic assistants, and locums
AI in healthcare: Anyone involve in exploring, developing, and introducing AI and automation to healthcare institutions
If that’s you and you are eager to be involved in transforming healthcare, let’s chat! Or if you are frustrated with your work in healthcare and want a listening ear, we are up for it too. Otherwise, we would appreciate any introduction to your healthcare friends.
We aim to publish weekly in this journal. Here are some types of content we are considering:
Updates on our research and startup
Deep dives into specific healthcare problems (e.g. use of AI in medical research)
Analyses of interesting healthcare trends (e.g. patterns among YC-funded healthcare startups)
Commentaries from healthcare practitioners, operators, and analysts (please reach out if you have a unique perspective to share)
If these interest you or you simply want to follow our journey, subscribe below to receive updates from us.