In the US, I will start a company that would partner with Doctors/Clinics/Hospitals where they would agree to transparent pricing for simple and routine services (like wellness checkup, simple procedure etc.). In return, the consumers will purchase a service from us (sort of insurance but I hate that word) for a much lower premium/fee per year (say something like 500 a year) where they pay the routine services out of pocket but we cover them for major procedures or catastrophic stuff (like cancer treatment). Each Participating doctor/clinic/hospital gets a cut of the premium that the consumer pays us.
This creates a win-win for all 3 parties. Consumers don't have to pay crazy health insurance premiums (which can be 15K easily for a family of 4 per year), pricing is transparent and even though they pay out of pocket for general services, the total they will spend per year will be MUCH less than average insurance premiums we pay today in the United States. Not to mention that insurance companies don't get to butt in every decision about which service should have been covered and which one not. Doctor gives a bill, patient pays it and all done. Probably will put some medical billing companies out of business too ? Doctors/clinics/hospitals get a cut of the premium from every consumer who participates effectively creating a huge pool/network.
Bonus feature: Our company will create a centralized platform where consumers can login and see their doctor visits and billing all in one place. No more individual health insurance websites or doctor billing websites. I can get a simple statement at the end of the year even if I visited 20 different doctors.
How we make money though with those lower yearly premiums will be a challenge. Btw, this was just a joke and a wishlist. I wish someone would do this.
That’s what “insurance” actually is— protection against unforeseen financial loses. The current idea of “insurance” is more of a health plan than a financial protection scheme.
Car insurance doesn’t pay oil changes because that’s a normal part of owning a car and thus should be budgeted for, but a crash isn’t — this insurance exists to make someone whole after a covered loss.
There's a really great writeup on this in "catastrophic care", a book I'd recommend on this topic.
Rather than "insurance", a better model is that "you'll need to spend a lot with p approaching 1, for some years of your life". So allocating each person a lifetime fixed pool of money (through the tax system) might be a good way to force some cost discipline onto the system, while still ensuring coverage and access are widespread.
What I like about this is that it makes explicit, society's commitment to sharing some of the burden of care. I have a close friend whose wife has Crohn's. It's a real bitch of a disease, essentially no known cure, chronic, you just try to get it "managed" as well as possible. We could probably spend an infinite amount of money trying to improve her quality of life, but that's not fair to society at large. So if we said, here, you get $x, that would encourage the medical system to provide cost-effective management options that would be within some bounded price range everyone agrees would be reasonable.
I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's precisely the conversation we need to be having.
'I think there's a real reluctance to put a precise dollar figure on how far we'll go per person toward "universal coverage of everything", but that's precisely the conversation we need to be having.'
This is only a thing in the US.
In the countries with sane public health systems, they have zero problem saying "Look, we've got this much money to spend, we think this way of spending it gets the most bang (roughly speaking, QALY's) for buck, so if you want more coverage hit up the private insurance market" [1].
And you know what, those private insurance markets work great because they actually have to provide meaningful value beyond the public system in order for consumers to bother using them.
As a vaguely relevant side note: Goddam it's difficult for me not to get angry about the diabolical state of the health system in the US and I don't even live there. There should be marches on the streets about this. You could radically improve the lives of the vast majority of 300 million people without spending an extra cent of government money on health if you just stopped being so goddam dumb about it [2].
When Obamacare was being debated, the UK was accused of having "death panels", which were basically this: deciding that it was uneconomical to provide certain types of care to certain types of patients where the QALYs achieved would be minimal and excessively expensive.
But that is "communist" and so Americans as a whole could never agree to it. They'd rather squeeze every last day out of someone rich, even with a low or negative quality of life impact, and let the poor die early.
I don't live there and it makes me mad too. It fails the Rawlsian test of ethics (veil of ignorance), which I think is a good way to decide on political issues.
Is this legal in the US anymore? What you're describing in practice isn't so dissimilar from a high-deductible catastrophic insurance plan. I bought one for myself out of college, and it was--at the time--both affordable and helpful. I haven't seen anything like it in practice in years. I'd heard that the ACA effectively phased them out.
How about instead a software system to manage all billing for a hospital owned/ran insurance scheme.
People signup for their favorite hospital. The hospital gets MRR. You set your primary care physician and other providers. They get MRR too per patient who's picked them.
Patient pays 4-6% of their monthly income for insurance.
When patient travels, their local hospital foots the bills. Hopefully this goes national and it lowers costs -- hospitals would negotiate with each other for lower costs instead of insurance companies. They would also have a centralized uniform billing (the biz) that joins everything together and is the glue. As a result each hospital no longer needs medical billers.
Hospitals could join forces to also negotiate in bulk the price of prescription drugs and keep those costs down as well. Since it's income based everyone could afford it, so it's basically privatized universal healthcare.
wow, love this doctor. I wonder why this stuff is not on mainstream news more often. Yea profitability is the concern with catastrophic insurance. Perhaps Govt. can jump in for that one ? (hint: universal healthcare mixed with some capitalism ?)
I am working on a platform to keep your health proactive, tied to your current ins coverage. you will get notices re: needed checkups, shots, etc. - as if you had a private physician's assistant. It will est what is covered vs out of pocket, recommended vs strongly recommended, etc., and stats. The dashboard is very user friendly - you can keep it simple or load it up with widgets. Notifications etc.
Convincing fake video and audio is coming soon - it isn't a major problem yet, but it will be more challenging to determine if recorded evidence can actually be relied on.
Some sort of service that signs and proves the authenticity of videos I think is a an idea that was until recently probably bad, but has now became good.
It'd be similar to what digicert does for websites. You could then work with browsers to show verification for trusted videos.
In an age with surveillance everywhere and when video and audio are so important in litigation I would make a tamper-proof camera that would sign every video/audio it produces. Tricky part would be to keep the signing key away from bad hands.
Teacher collaboration tool to open source lesson plans.
Create a platform like facebook or github for teachers to collaborate on planning an entire unit. At the moment each teacher does it alone or maybe a department may get together and create some content.
But there are thousands of schools tens of thousands of teachers, all of them building lessons and delivering them.
I'm curious to know if you are the US. The scenario you describe was very much that of the past here, but since "No child left behind" and "Core Curriculum," the lessons and content has become homogenous. Leaving out my opinion of this, just noting that was the goal from Congress, and my own observations across my three kids and within my pool of parent friends in other states indicates the same.
I've actually thought that something like this could be a fairly useful product. May I ask what your inspiration for such an idea was? Perhaps personal or anecdotal experience? Genuinely curious.
I intend to retire from my current successful company (founded in 2011) and design a range of personal health & wellbeing items for people on the Autism spectrum (more for people with mild-to-moderate ASD, Aspergers, or other similar disability, as opposed to for severe cases - i.e. this isn't a medtech company but a health and wellbeing product line). I stumbled on this by creating a few prototypes at home for my personal use that really contribute to my quality of life as someone with mild ASD traits.
Also, a social enterprise-based reforestation project – I'll be using same savings to buy a piece of deforested ex-farmland (one in particular) and working with friends and local community to return it to its former forested glory. The goal is really to give back but also to learn a heap about land management and permaculture.
For-profit and non-profit, respectively.
So it's really businesses that scratch my own itch.
A staircase bot to carry heavy objects. With an increasingly aging population, it is a literal pain to be lugging objects - especially heavy ones - up/down stairways.
I really think education is a very inefficient process currently. Not that it doesn't allow growth of other traits which it doesn't value but also the virtues which it does see fit remain undeveloped.
For starters, I will begin with a program like 'Computer science/ concepts for developers' which will go far further than Networking, OS, DB...
The most important part of it would be that it will specifically crafted for the individual- it will start with the level of expertise the learner is at and incrementally go up.
Secondly, it will be focusing on virtues which imo makes learning efficient and enjoyable- like pressure free learning but getting sense of accomplishment by doing stuff. The best reason one would be learning for would be for themselves.
A not-for-profit company that builds an AI based identification and reputation (drivers license meets credit score meets ebay ratings) system on the block chain (perhaps using voice + location + image to imprint a person as being who they say they are.
Then use this identification system to create a crypto-currency that has guaranteed basic income built in, and the person would need to re-verify every 6 months to keep their account.
The not-for-profit company would also start it's own businesses that provide products/services to consumers and use only local fiat + the ubi-coin for payment with maybe benefits for using crypto over fiat (to increase adoption).
Execs for all businesses would be capped at 125x average worker salary. All left over money at end of fiscal year would be divided up evenly and 30% would go to workers as a bonus, 70% would be dispersed to ubi coin holders evenly. Businesses the co-op could start could be grocers, mail-order pharmacy, insurance companies, cell phone providers, the goal being --be self-sufficient but not make a profit except enough to pay all workers, and reward the community as a whole and also make services people use everyday cheaper and more affordable.
I'm actually exploring this idea right now. It's been an issue I've been facing in my day job and think it is only going to become more pervasive as more teams start to work remotely.
If anyone is currently experiencing this issue, I would absolutely love to talk to you! I only have a really rudimentary site up right now at http://hallwayapp.com if anyone is even remotely curious (no pun intended).
I was a little vague in my original statement because I think there's a lot of areas of improvement across the board, but I was specifically thinking of the virtual meeting when I wrote that answer.
There's no denying that something gets lost on a Zoom/WebEx/other conference call - attendees are distracted, miscommunications happen, and people have to be assertive to get their message across. This can be overcome by a small team that is 110% driven in their goal, but it's a model that can't be adapted by all industries/sizes/cultures.
I'm still not sure what the solution to this is, but I think there will be a dramatic paradigm shift. Maybe the trigger will be VR or some disruptor we already see coming, but it may be something more approachable.
All of those tools you listed are CRUD-based. I think the space would benefit from something more reactive, where multiple people can "play" on the same screen.
Without going full VR I still think a dedicated piece of hardware might be the way to go to normalize across everyone's setups and preferences. Maybe a big ass tablet (or around the size of the Surface Studio) with networked persistent whiteboarding / kanban boarding / alert-messaging software could be an MVP. Those are the main things that I wish were improved after ~4 years working with distributed teams. Informational meetings per se I haven't really had problems with, google hangouts/meet or GoToMeeting have worked out well enough. I'm not sure how we'll ever solve the "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem without VR though.
> "conversations that only happen because your desk is next to mine" problem
I think part of a solution to that problem is more deliberate communication. Water cooler talk, informal office conversations, whatever you want to call those, while occasionally helpful they can also lead to the creation of information silos between the people participating in these conversations.
The constraint of not having the opportunity to engage in this kind of conversations might actually be beneficial. Distributed teams force you to communicate more efficiently and more purposefully.
We find ourselves gravitating more and more toward https://realtimeboard.com/ for distributed planning and brainstorming. It's replaced whiteboards for some in-person planning meetings as well. In almost every case where I've said "I wonder if...", it's worked exactly how I wanted. ("I wonder if I can resize a group of sticky notes," "I wonder if I can add a comment and indicate reinforcement/critique," "I wonder if there's a timer plugin," etc.)
It can get a little slow for larger boards – we did multiple weeks of branding iteration in a single board with hundreds of images and sticky notes – but overall I'd highly recommend it.
Something to do with transportation and logistics really. Free trade is just not going away despite populists doing their dardnest to make it more difficult and free trade runs on transporting stuff from A to B easily.
If you could innovate something minor in that field, I'm talking something that impacts maybe 5% of the shipping process, that's an absurdly big market.
However, don't do like the airlines and build your business plan on having exclusive agreements with nice and naive governments. Once that special treatment stops and they let smaller players in party's over.
I actually don't think I'd start this one personally, but given the recent supreme court ruling, I would expect that a sports betting site/app would likely get traction pretty quickly.
There is also Sentinel2 (which is 10m) that can be used commercially.
Obviously DigitalGlobe (and recently Planet) do better with <1m resolution but it seems to be more expensive and (sub)licensing might be non-trivial (at least they are vague in pricing details).
pretty vague there -- what do you mean data firm?...like a consultancy? I mean, OP didn't specify what type of business to start, but in some sense pretty much all tech start-ups are data firms.
True, but the number of executives and managers that are just starting to ask "what's this GDPR thing I keep hearing about?" tells me that it's about to be a growth industry.
IME, there's also a significant overlap between the execs that insist "2 years isn't enough time to get compliant" and execs that ignored it for the last 2 years. Not sure what that means, but it's at the point where I write off timeline complaints as whining and lack of forethought.
Imagine you have a fleet of vehicles and one of your drivers just had a fender-bender or seen one occur. One or both of the involved parties will call the police and notify insurance agencies. Sometimes the evidence, as deemed by you to favor your situation can get moved around or shuffled by local authorities. With my service, you'll be able to post as many pictures or videos as you like of the actual event. Our in-vehicle dash-cams will also collaborate the information you're uploading. The complete offering and system helps you secure a better insurance rate saving you millions. I just need $4.5MM to get started.
#2
This one has an even greater return. Imagine REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. It will do really well!
This creates a win-win for all 3 parties. Consumers don't have to pay crazy health insurance premiums (which can be 15K easily for a family of 4 per year), pricing is transparent and even though they pay out of pocket for general services, the total they will spend per year will be MUCH less than average insurance premiums we pay today in the United States. Not to mention that insurance companies don't get to butt in every decision about which service should have been covered and which one not. Doctor gives a bill, patient pays it and all done. Probably will put some medical billing companies out of business too ? Doctors/clinics/hospitals get a cut of the premium from every consumer who participates effectively creating a huge pool/network.
Bonus feature: Our company will create a centralized platform where consumers can login and see their doctor visits and billing all in one place. No more individual health insurance websites or doctor billing websites. I can get a simple statement at the end of the year even if I visited 20 different doctors.
How we make money though with those lower yearly premiums will be a challenge. Btw, this was just a joke and a wishlist. I wish someone would do this.