One of America’s favorite Sharks, Mark Cuban, doesn’t stop looking for the next great innovation when the Shark Tank cameras stop rolling. Like any great investor, Cuban is always looking towards the future, and he sees the path of healthcare paved with technology. From personalized medications to mobile genetic testing devices, Cuban discusses investing in telemedicine and beyond. One of our clients has been venturing into the world of Telemedicine, and at Linx we feel it’s only beneficial to keep searching for the next great path of innovation.
Mark Cuban might be bullish on the business of healthcare these days, but he’s not so into the stores that deliver it.
The future of healthcare, according to Cuban, is technology that eliminates the middle man (namely doctors’ offices and pharmacies) in the diagnosis and treatment process, the Shark Tank judge told Arianna Huffington onstage at Advertising Week in New York on Wednesday.
Today, when you visit a drugstore, the pharmacist describes side effects and risks attached to your medication. “Over the next 15 to 20 years,” Cuban says, “medicine will be so personalized there will be no drugstores.”
Instead, Cuban sees a future when technology can diagnose and design tailored treatments by analyzing your sweat or monitoring your heart rate or breathing. That’s why over the last few years, Cuban has been accumulating investments in healthcare technology companies. At San Francisco’s Launch Festival in February 2014, he said sensors like those in a Fitbit would be the next wave of healthcare tech, freeing users from manually entering data to learn about their health.
Now, he’s investing in companies that make hardware attachments that turn smartphones into multi-purpose physicians. Among others, he’s invested in the cervical cancer screening tool MobileODT and Biomeme, which claims to do genetic testing for certain types of diseases within an hour.
Traditional pharmacies and sharing economy companies alike are on board with this vision to either automate diagnoses and treatment processes or eliminate the physical task of visiting a doctor or pharmacist altogether. CVS has been experimenting with telemedicine, which allows patients to video chat with a doctor to discuss symptoms and treatment, Norman de Greve, chief marketing officer at CVS Health said at a panel on the future of branding in New York on Tuesday.
On the same panel was Kira Scherer, the chief marketing officer at car-hailing app Lyft. She discussed the potential of the company’s concierge service, which allows users to arrange pickup and dropoff for a non-emergency medical appointments.
Source: Inc.com September 29, 2016
