healthenclave's comments

Merry Christmas Everyone! From India

Wow great to have a Pathologist in the Room.

I think this device is super awesome and I was trying to come up with something similar a few years back.

The primary concerns is that one of the first things I learnt in Med School is that capillary blood is way less reliable in compare to venous blood for something as important as CBC.

Not sure how they are accounting for the issue that the sample they have isn't the best one to get started with.

ps: killjoywashere how do I get in touch with you ? Am at Asingh [at] healthenclave.com

Great advice !!

Thanks. But for me, I am NOT looking for any external validation. Except my users, whom I deeply care about. My situation (being in a Developing country) is a little different from your IMHO.

I think SendGrind, Buffer, Couchbase and Ionic Framework are a few notable ones that were previously discussed. BTW: great to see you here. I used Feedly(get stream) a while back in a project of mine and it worked liked a charm.

Hello Michael,

I was suggested by few YC Alums that YC will not accept a startup if the founders are not working full time on it.

Question: In my case I am working full time because it's helping me fund my startup and It's actually helping me grow it due to connection to my peers (I am M.D from India working on a Health Startup). Is this a bad sign ?

I simply do not have the resources (and enough revenue) to quit my job Yet. But I am dedicated 200 % towards my startup and the vision. And I spend most of my time (outside of work) on my startup.

Thanks that makes a lot of sense.

Ashu fellow Indian Founder here. I think it's mostly about dedication, domain expertise(if applicable), progress and traction. They list it out here http://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/

Not official YC advice. But I believe I read somewhere Avg. YC company gets rejected twice before being accepted. What matters is are you making progress in the direction of your vision.

Fellow Indian Founder here. PG once said (I think to AirBnB) go where your users are.

Hello Michael,

Thanks for the AMA

Question: Is there are more stringent criteria for accepting international founders and companies, focused on their local markets?

The reason I am asking this is because most of the companies from India in the latest batch, seem to have a lot of traction and/or significant amount of funding before being accepted into YC. Most looks like good candidates for Series A.

Vs other US based founders and startups in the current and previous batches

As a Medical Doc and a health tech entrepreneur current living in Bilaspur. I find this fascinating. But I think the village where JSS is located is called as Ganiyari ??

Taiga is Project Management app based on Django and Angular. https://github.com/taigaio/taiga-back

This is a common problem in medicine. As some one who regularly prescribes xray to patients (in Orthopedic Surgery) we have very strict instructions to the radiology technicians to perform the imaging of the side that is mentioned in the orders. Due to a variety of reasons. But we sometimes do make mistakes.

But like the author describes doing the same mistake is the OR and performing a surgery is a disaster of several magnitudes. One of the common problem is that many times senior consultants have limited contact with the patients and their sole focus is doing surgeries. Usually residents and the younger docs are involved in the preoperative care of the patient.

This is why Indian people eat Curry!

Jokes apart on a more serious note the crux of the study is --

"Compared with those who ate spicy foods less than once a week, those who consumed spicy foods 6 or 7 days a week showed a 14% relative risk reduction in total mortality. "

Although this study is very vague, in Asian cultures health benefits of spices and various plant products is well known.

Ginger : Has Cox2 inhibitory function. Acting in a similar way to Aspirin and other NSAIDS. Helps prevent heart attacks

Curcumin : found in turmeric has anti-inflammatory similar to ginger but is poorly absorbed. Hence mad more benefits for the Gut.

Arjuna Terminalis : Bark of the plant is known to have anti-hypertensive benefits.

And the list goes on.

The problem is that in the traditional way these plants are consumed (unprocessed in food and NOT in EXTRACT form) these have very poor Bioavailability.

The only way these so called health benefits would be apparent is if they were part of the diet (you eat them everyday - as noted in the study) or they are consumed in the form of Extract.

Also many of these compounds can not be patented and this deters the pharmaceutical industry to make large investments in the clinical trails and bringing them to the market.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/?term=curcumin

http://time.com/3984504/turmeric-supplements-curcumin/

Hey James,

Good to see your post on the front page, and it was a nice writeup. Personally for me the issue with Python 3 has been the lack of support by many good 3rd party Django apps. Until that happens I can't see myself moving anytime soon.

I would like to give my 2 cents to the discussion, as a Medical Doc who was training to become an Orthopedic Surgeon.

One of the problems with Surgical Branches is that beyond a certain point (i.e: Beyond from knowing how to do a procedure) the act of performing a surgery essentially is an art form (Skill). I learned the same from one of the leading Orthopedic Surgeons in India. And that is one of the crucial most factors that differentiates Good surgeon from a Bad One.

Although skill can NOT be quantified but certainly in the case of Surgery we can quantify the results of the skills in terms of complications of surgery, recovery and patient satisfaction.

One solution to the problem would be :

(A) To have a feedback mechanism for doctors. Where they receive a score on their performance and can compare if to other surgeons performing similar procedures.

The surgeon would upload a video of all the types of procedures they do every 3 months. And just like NEJM a committee of people provide inputs and rating on the skills of the surgeon. This score in combination with the complication rate and patient feedback would go into making the overall score of the doctor. The doctor will be able to see where he stand in compare to their colleagues from across the country (possible the world). And also for newer (or BAD) surgeons this system would provide a way to learn from the best in the field and improve their skills.

(B) If you try to make such a score Public initially, it will receive a huge backslash from the doctors and the industry. But having an internal score keeping mechanism is much better than having no score / rating system.

(C) Some hospitals actually do have internal metrics where they track surgeon's performance. In terms of complication rate and other metrics -- but this data is RARELY available to the public.

(D) Unless some kind of law is passed at a Federal level in the US, I am not very optimistic about the situation improving.

You are right. More importantly hand picking individuals to be part of the study could result in Selection Bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

The other logical workaround would be to give the HNI donor a trail of the drug but not include (or interpret with caution) the results of that particular individual (which can be tough for rare diseases)

I am just making a general statement and I was not accusing a particular group of people, gov or agency in doing so.

In a fair world we would allocate funds for medical research based on number of people suffering from illness and not their purchasing power -- but then the world isn't truly fair to everyone.

Imagine this were happening inside a country -- a large percentage of population with income below 60K suffered from an particular disease A and a very small chunk of people earning more than 120K suffered from a rare disease B. And everyone including the government decides to fund research on disease B -- won't that be unfair and unjust ??

Also with people shunning vaccines and emerging varied forms of resistance, Disease of the so called "Poor Developing Countries" might come back to haunt the "Rich"

I would like to shed light on the fact that "The Rich" have already bought up a lot of clinical trials and Medical research in general.

If you look at the research done on disease prevalent in Rich population vs prevalent diseases in the poor -- you will see a clear pattern.

For example: There are significantly more resources (Time, People and Money) focused on Rare Genetic Diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis (a rare genetic disease in Caucasians) Vs resources to find cure for malaria or better medications (in spite of the growing problem of resistance)

Although many of the disease that are more common in poorer people are always linked to socio-economic issues and are not just a disease in themselves. From intestinal parasites to malaria.

But not providing adequate resources to all such disease can turn out to be a disaster -- like that happened with US ignoring Tuberculosis as a significant health problem and then subsequent re-emergence of TB due hiv and MDR (drug resistant) forms of TB