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Mobihealth News Interview with MedTech-IQ member ... Kenneth Seymens
See excerpts from interview by Mobihealth News', Brian Dolan with MedTech-IQ member, Kenneth Seymens...
... Ken is organizing the upcoming HIMSS Middle East Health Insurers Innovation Forum in Dubai, the 8-10th of November 2010 ...
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For mobile health, what’s old is new again
Back in the 1990s, Kenneth Seymens was the senior manager of Apple’s Medical Informatics Group. Seymens directed an initiative at Apple that developed native Macintosh clients for health IT systems. His team partnered with 120 medical schools to develop the medical apps for Macs, but they soon migrated their efforts over to Apple’s first handheld device, the ill-fated Newton, a personal digital assistant that held great promise for point of care applications...
... “Of course, Apple eventually stepped back from the Newton,” Seymens told MobiHealthNews in an interview. “Honestly, it was premature at that time. What we were doing was very disruptive for physician workflow. Compare that to today: Smartphone adoption among healthcare practitioners, including Apple’s iPhone, is extremely strong.”...
... "Really, this [mobile health space] hasn’t fundamentally changed all that much,” Seymens said. “Sure, the technology is better and faster. Yes, wireless is going to move it all forward, especially in the developing world because many of those markets don’t have existing infrastructure. No one is laying cable in the desert, for example.” ...
... Seymens is a believer in the concept of deploying mobile health solutions in developing markets and once their efficacy is proven, bringing them back to the US....
... Seymens left Apple in the late 1990’s to found a startup along with a few Apple Newton engineers. The startup was called JustUs Communications, which focused on creating medical apps for the Apple Newton among other devices. Again, Seymens said, JustUs was ahead of its time and it eventually ran out of gas… and its Angel funding...
... “Again, trying to change practice patterns for physicians is no small task,” Seymens said.
Soon after Seymen joined the American Hospital Association as its first Chief Information Officer and stayed on for a few years. After one too many challenges to his business acumen, Seymens said he went to Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business to get an MBA. Seymens then joined an investment bank and headed up the firm’s healthcare technology practice and worked on capital raises, consolidations and the like...
... Seymens then served as president and CEO of a medical device company that retrofitted personal health devices, including pulse oximeters, weight scales, blood glucose meters and more with wireless chips. The devices could then communicate with a local hub and transmit information to secure portals where healthcare providers could analyze it and make recommendations to the patient....
... Currently, Seymens is a Venture Partner at Vesalius Ventures...
... “I sit at that sweet spot between healthcare informatics, telecommunications and medical devices,” Seymens said. “I’m still looking very opportunistically at venture opportunities in mHealth or telehealth, but it’s a tough market for investors to get their arms around. There are not too many private equity or venture capital plays in this space. It’s very boutique-oriented with lots of one-sy, two-sy deployments. Too many proof of concept companies and no major wins yet.”...
Read on at: http://mobihealthnews.com/8572/for-mobile-health-whats-old-is-new-a...
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