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It seems like health tech is the most "scammable" vertical, or is most "scam-prone"? (scam might be a strong word, bs maybe more accurate?) Maybe it is because

• pedalpete 5y ago
  As a founder in the health-tech space (sleep-tech/neuro-tech in particular), I think it's more than just related to health-insurance. My take is it isn't just the tech side of health that is scammy. In sleep and neuro, we see all sorts of products which make outrageous claims that they say are backed by "science" from leading research organizations, but when you go looking for the research, there is nothing there! I think sometimes people want to believe their own BS. I wonder how often the people selling/peddling their wares believe what they are saying, or just don't care. We're being very cautious in our GTM to make sure we build a lasting and trusted company at https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co
  • mountainriver 5y ago
    This is cool!
  • robg 5y ago
    What are you using to benchmark sleep quality?
    • pedalpete 5y ago
      We're beginning by focusing just on slow-wave oscillations, and we can directly measure the impact we are having on those through the EEG in our headband - what was the response to a stimmed SWO vs a non-stim/sham SWO. We're starting here because there is a large volume of good research in stimulating SWOs. Does that answer your question? I've just sent you a Linkedin request if you'd like to discuss further.
      • elkos 5y ago
        As a sleep tech please don't hesitate to refer people to do a sleep study in a lab setting. Sleep labs especially in universal healthcare setting like the one I work on are there to assist patient healthcare outcomes.
        • pedalpete 5y ago
          Absolutely, our target markets don't overlap much (in the early stages) so people who are coming to us for specific issues, we will be recommending to sleep labs. However, built into how we are going to market, it is doubtful we will have many people who are looking for solutions to their sleep problems. Ignore our current landing page, that is a broad generalization, we will update to be much more specific when the time is right.
  • vimy 5y ago
    Is this a Zeo replacement? I miss having access to an at home EEG headband.
    • pedalpete 5y ago
      Kinda, we're not just measuring sleep, we use auditory stim to improve deep sleep. We're not sure how much data we'll be giving to users, as we don't believe most people benefit from more info about sleep. At the same time, we are discussing internally giving access to the full data suite for users who do need it. For example, we're working with some researchers, and have interest from air force, etc. who want the full data. Do you have thoughts on what you loved about having the info from Zeo? Do you use another tracker now? I use Oura as well as our headband to compare how good our classification is, but I don't find the data itself valuable.
      • icelancer 5y ago
        Interesting tech. I help run a business that works with a lot of professional athletes who are interested in improving their sleep quality. We do a lot of the data analysis using various wearables and methods in our middleware; we'd be interested in all the data to evaluate impact and in A:B tests (like we already do with other interventions). I'll reach out to you via Linkedin unless you drop your email here.
      • vimy 5y ago
        I was tracking how many times I woke up at night, how fast I fell asleep and how much deep sleep I got. Not nearly enough for my age as it turned out. Used the data to find out what could improve my sleep. (Exercising in the morning or evening, no big meals before bedtime, etc). Quantified self basically. I currently use the sleepcycle app. Not nearly as useful as an actual EEG headband. Maybe consider also giving full access to people like me? Like a dev mode or something.
        • pedalpete 5y ago
          The non-EEG devices are getting pretty good at that data, your phone next to your bed, not so much... EEG is probably overkill for most people, but it is the only way to detect SWO, and other parts of sleep we want to manipulate via sound. Plus, having a band on your head with bone conduction gives us an easy way to get sound stim to you. We'll have something in the future which is more generalized to a larger audience, but we're focused on a few groups that need what we're doing atm.
• kalimanzaro 5y ago
  IMHO it doesn't help that the middle class in California especially are health obsessed. Couple that with a kind of contrarian or rationalist/conspiratorial mindset in the public intellectuals(think Phil Dick or even Musk/Thiel -- I wanted to say not medically knowledgeable but you have got various Stanford profs too) -- you get healthcare very ripe.. eg cancer warnings on pretty much every consumable? "Science" is like a means to what an end!
  • pyuser583 5y ago
    Whenever I visit California I’m shocked at how many things have “cause fetal deformity” signs.
    • adolph 5y ago
      https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/proposition-65-list $ wc -l p65chemicalslist.csv 1056 p65chemicalslist.csv
      • pyuser583 5y ago
        I’m aware of the law. But it’s maddening how the law doesn’t really tell anyone what to do. A building has one of these pro-forma signs in front of it. Should a pregnant woman not go in the building?
        • strken 5y ago
          This was one of the very stupid things about California. You'd have buildings with warnings that the upholstery in the chairs was manufactured using chemicals known to cause cancer, but have no idea what that actually meant. Are other chairs any safer? Am I at risk if they wash the fabric first? Is there any meaningful lower bound to the risk? What chemical is it, exactly?
          • adolph 5y ago
            Magic 8 ball method sed -n $[ $[$RANDOM % 1056 ] + 2]p p65chemicalslist.csv
• rossdavidh 5y ago
  Or that the fake-it-till-you-make-it has actual laws against it that get you in trouble in health, but if you are a new social media or search engine or electric scooter or ridesharing or whatever, you may get into some trouble but not as much. The health industry has a lot more laws about telling the truth and getting consent, than most industries, and they're enforced better.
  • dogleash 5y ago
    pmuch this. My experience is specifically devices/MDDS, but Facebook style “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly” [0] is one of the biggest sins possible. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerberg-elite-rules-11631541353 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerber...
• s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I think part of it is the industry at large has a speculative and probabilistic nature to development. Much of it is betting on yet to be developed science, so so you rarely have a prototype that can be tested and infected. This is certainly the case for devices and drugs. When you couple this lack of objective performance data with an opaque and extremely entrenched Market sector, there's a lot of room for shady business. To top it off, when Healthcare start up over-promise and under-deliver it gets a level of criticism and outrage that is higher then many other sectors
• ramraj07 5y ago
  Importantly, many many companies I’ve seen yc fund in the past on the biotech side seem sus like this. Except maybe ginkgo?
  • uncomputation 5y ago
    My hypothesis is that those biotech companies which pitch to YC, largely a tech/Silicon Valley incubator, are more likely to be, if not scams, then embrace the “move fast, break things” mentality which for biotech can be either dangerous or bullshit (100+ “therapy” and “mental wellness” apps)
    • lvs 5y ago
    • hef19898 5y ago
      The opposite would be BionTech, there it took years of mRNA research, and a pandemic, to get their breakthrough. There is tech and there is tech it seems.
• axg11 5y ago
  You covered the main driving reasons that involve insurance. I think there are also factors inherent to medicine that make health tech “scammable”. There are few objective truths in medicine. Our understanding of human health is still fairly basic. On top of that, many of our best interventions, drugs, and procedures produce only middling results. When the state of the art is poor, it’s easy to sell a vision for improvement. Measuring the success of health tech is very difficult. What does product market fit look like for early cancer detection? From afar, it may seem as if success for a cancer screening company should be simple to measure: how many cancers can the technology/company detect? That’s not the case. In medicine there are always confounding factors. For example, in cancer detection, many cancers are low threat (not the same as benign). Identifying a cancer that is unlikely to threaten your life, or worse a false positive result, will end up making your health worse. You will undergo unnecessary biopsies and stress until the issue is resolved. You might think: OK, but that’s measuring the wrong thing, the real metric to measure is how much longer those patients live with or without the cancer screening tech. You’d be right, but accurately measuring that takes 5+ years. All this is to say, health tech is a difficult path, perhaps the most difficult path to production in all of tech. Along that road, there are many opportunities for unethical operators to cut corners.
• raverbashing 5y ago
  Or because founders can get away with a wishy washy description of the tech that looks good at first but is full of issues Most investors have a very low understanding of actual biology, or even anything outside of "IT". See: uBeam
  • nowherebeen 5y ago
    This is part of the problem. None of these investors, including YC, have domain expertise. They only preach that the founders themselves should have it, but they are the ones giving the funding. So, in the end, they only look a perceived credentials of the founder and not the tech, which is BS. No one with strong credentials and solid tech would need VC funding, they already have grants. And by then, private equity would be lining up.
• ethbr0 5y ago
  > Maybe it is because health-insurance billing is already so opaque and error-prone it provides cover for questionable services. At least in America, it seems a consequence of the stratified, multi-party market. Each participant only has limited visibility into the entire stack, which allows scams to appear more legitimate than they might in industries where each participant has a better view of the whole. Also, as you say, it's just ridiculously manual for data entry. :-( But slowly getting better. But that means that the sort of heavyweight detection or correction algorithms one would use elsewhere would just spew nonstop false positives.
  • refurb 5y ago
    Medicare (public healthcare for those over 65) has rampant fraud. So does Canada's single payer system.
    • ethbr0 5y ago
      On the Medicare side, rampant attempts, but also pretty constant auditing. It's a hard problem, but it does have a lot of people whose sole job it is to investigate it (on both the CMS and insurance provider sides).