Irehab.com: Let doctors pay to give you health care

Nick — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:06:30 +0000

The new start-up Irehab.com tries to take a different approach to health care. Patients can get free advice on how to treat specific complaints. By answering a few questions and looking at several 3D animations, these users should be able to diagnose themselves. To treat for instance ‘back pain’ they can follow step-by-step instruction videos made by physical therapists but personally selected by external doctors to fit the needs of that specific patient. The first 10 consults are free of charge, both for the patient and the doctor. On the platform itself, they will have a private area where they can keep track of the results. After the first 10 consults the doctors will have to pay $0.99 for each patient that they want to follow up in the future. For further advice the patient will have to pay a fixed nominal fee per month directly to the clinic or doctor. On average this fee will be around $9.99. The only money that Irehab.com” receives will be the $0.99 per month, so they will need a large database to make this Freemium concept profitable. Within a few years it will be common practice that people will diagnose and monitor themselves without the hassle of expensive expert consults. Many companies are looking for ways to monetize this evolution. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are only a few of the large group IT services that are around these days. But also beyond the normal web experience we see these experimental concepts. Recently Apple presented the Lifescan’s New Diabetes iPhone App that communicates with a seperate glucose monitoring device. The latter works similar as the VirtuaGym concept we presented earlier. There people could monitor their offline exercise habits to benchmark these with other peers online. This D.I.Y. health care market is nearly unexplored so you may expect a boom of new concepts and ideas in the coming year. Many of them will fail but some of them will change the way we look at health care forever.

Special note to our Dutch and Belgian friends:
We are running an innovation battle at BelgieVsNederland.be and NederlandVsBelgie.nl. Get your inspiring reward with just 6 questions to answer.

Thanks! @nickdemey & @philderidder

A non-advertising based Free business by TruGenetics

Nick — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:33:54 +0000

TruGenetics understands that the value of genetic profile analysis lies in the combined data of a large group of people. Therefore they decided not to charge their users for individual genome reports in contrast to several competitors. During the first phase of their business, the company will offer this service for free to at least 10.000 users. These people will be asked to send TruGenetics detailed profile information together with a salvia (spit) sample. In exchange for their support, users will receive a service in return in the form of a detailed personal genome report. For Truegenetics all this data will hopefully lead to new findings in phenotypes that could be used to patent new products. Such products can then be sold to biotech, pharma and medical companies. If nothing comes out of this expensive research, they could still sell the data, but this will not be the main goal of the company.

This is a good example of a free business concept that doesn’t rely on advertising or charging premium users. By means of crowdsourcing, they build up the true value of the company. The service for service transaction in their system is also remarkable. The service Trugenetics offers to its users is so personalised (what is more personalised then your own DNA?) that more then enough value is created to encourage people to participate. For many it will even be an unique experience to be part of this global research program that could be beneficial for society one day. Overall this concept shows us once again how consumers are evolving when it comes to privacy and how this creates potential to all sorts of health 2.0 businesses.

The Board Of Innovation » e-health

Irehab.com: Let doctors pay to give you health care

A non-advertising based Free business by TruGenetics