A few months ago we started spending more time on the healthcare vertical and got extremely excited about the amount of innovation that we were seeing. It felt like the healthcare industry was at a similar tipping point than education a few years ago.

Yesterday we published a guest post on VentureBeat outlining our investment thesis for the health care vertical. At the core, we believe that “consumerization” – the direct adoption of  innovative software products by health care professionals and patients – will be driving the future healthcare delivery:

The “consumerization of healthcare” will help move data and conversations from the doctor’s office into the cloud, where they are now visible and useful to countless other healthcare professionals working on similar cases.

The right collaborative tools will bring together professionals, as well as patients, to generate faster and more effective diagnoses. Solutions will include platforms that enable the secure sharing of medical records, as well as large public knowledge-bases that can crowdsource symptom diagnosis and treatment.

Based on this thesis, we think that some of the big winners in this space will include companies that can unlock this data and knowledge in large networks of users:

The companies that will win big in this space are those who can successfully connect people (doctor-doctor, patient-patient, doctor-patient) in a large, secure, and regulatory-compliant network. In addition to unlocking data, platforms will incorporate analytics and machine learning in the backend in order to add actionable insights and predictions to the data dump.

We recently announced our first healthcare investment (Figure1, a safe photo-sharing app for healthcare professionals) and we are looking forward to making more investments in this space in the upcoming years.

Related articles

• The health-tech booster shot: Bringing health care into the 21st century (venturebeat.com)
• New investment: Figure 1, a healthcare photo sharing app (version1v.wpengine.com)