Seattle 2.0 Blog

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January 23, 2008

WED

JAN

Startups attract new startups on the same segment

By Marcelo Calbucci

I've always been fascinated with the fact that certain industries of an industry end up agglomerating themselves in the same region. As in Internet startups in San Francisco, car makers in Detroit, advertising agencies in New York, movie studios in LA, etc.

But if you look at sub-segments of an industry this happens as well, you can certainly making multiple trend cases for Seattle. Case in point: Web-based Health/Wellness startups.

While working on categorizing the startups for next month's SSI, I found a curiosity to the say the least. There are quite a few startups tacking social network or services for the health conscious. If you look at the list below, the founders come mostly from tech companies, so we can't blame this cluster on some major drug maker. What could it be then?

Here are some startups from the list that fit that criteria:

Healia

Personalized health search engine

iMedExchange

Online community for physicians

Limeade

Online wellnes system for employees

RealSelf

Review and information on anti-aging products

Sweat365

Social network for athletes to track daily routines

Trusera

Social network for people to find health information

Zeenami

Help people achieve personal goals like lose weight or quit smoking

Any web-health startup in Seattle that I'm missing?

10:20 AM | Permalink | 1 comment

Comments (1) for "Startups attract new startup...

Great observation, Marcelo! Speaking as one of the founders of iMedExchange, I have some thoughts about why healthcare, and why now.

Why Healthcare? At $2 trillion dollars and growning, the US healthcare industry is the single largest non-military market on the planet. It's also one of the most complex and one of the most broken industries. In terms of administrative technology (as opposed to clinical tech) the healthcare industry has lagged virtually every other industry of any significance. In fact, despite endless studies that purport to show that electronic medical records systems reduce costs, reduce mistakes and generally improve the quality of care, the rate of adoption remains glacial. Add to the mix a broad movement toward consumer-directed healthcare, a kludgey claim reembursement process, government mandates, regulatory compliance issues, the fact that everyone, everywhere needs it all the time, recession or not, and about a hundred other factors and it's easy to see why healthcare is an attractive industry -- lots of opportunities.

Why now? An obvious factor is an aging population -- which means many more sick people along with lots of new opportunities to treat them... and sell them a ton of stuff. But, actually, it's not really a "now" thing... unless "now" covers the last hand full of years. There have been a truck load of healthcare startups coming out of Seattle for at least the last half dozen years, including OneHealthPort, MedOrder, ClearMed, OnHealth (acquired by WebMD), PracticePartner, TransVerio, 3DGrid Healthcare Solutions, and a bunch of others that I can't quite recall at the moment -- some have come and gone. A couple of more recent forays not on your list are Clarity Health and PeerWisdom.

As for why Seattle? I'm not sure, actually. There are a few significant healthcare related players up here, including Frazier Health Ventures, WellPoint, even Overlake Hospital has a venture fund. But it must be more than that.

As for us over at iMedExchange, we're taking a different tact from the vast majority of healthcare startups. While most healthcare startups are go after clinical information or chasing the healthcare consumer, we're focused on the doctors as people. By providing a value add social networking context for doctors to connect we're aiming to build the most useful place on the Web for physicians.

Good luck to all the Seattle startups out there, healthcare or otherwise!!

Bob

By Bob Crimmins - 1/23/2008 11:36 AM