Thursday, August 17, 2017

A Start-Up Suggests a Fix to the Health Care Morass - The New York Times

WINFIELD, Kan. — If you watched the drama in Washington last month, you may have come away with the impression that the American health care system is a hopeless mess.

In Congress, a doomed plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Obama's health care law, has turned into a precarious effort to rescue it. Meanwhile, President Trump is still threatening to mortally wound the law — which he insists, falsely, is collapsing anyway — while his administration is undermining its being carried out.

So it is surprising that across the continent from Washington, investors and technology entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley see the American health care system as the next great market for reform.

Some of their interest is because of advances in technology like smartphones, wearable health devices (like smart watches), artificial intelligence, and genetic testing and sequencing. There is a regulatory angle: The Affordable Care Act added tens of millions of people to the health care market, and the law created several incentives for start-ups to change how health care is provided. The most prominent of these is Oscar, a start-up co-founded by Joshua Kushner (the younger brother of Mr. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner), which has found ways to mine health care data to create a better health insurance service.

But perhaps the most interesting and potentially groundbreaking company created in connection with the Affordable Care Act is Aledade, a start-up founded in 2014 by Farzad Mostashari, a doctor and technologist who was the national coordinator for health information technology at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/technology/a-start-up-suggests-a-fix-to-the-health-care-morass.html?