The first post

I suppose that this is the "obligatory first post waffle".

Cutting to the chase, I intend to use this blog to post on technology trends, and my experience of growing a venture funded health technology company in the US.

Where to start? Well, my name is Matthew Adams, and I am the CTO of Digital Healthcare.

DH was founded in Cambridge, England, in late 1999 with a relatively small amount of funding - some from VCs, some from Angels (from the Cambridge community). In total, we kicked off with about a million dollars in the bank, 5 people, and some clever imaging software inherited as part of our MBO, but beginning to show its age.

Over the next 6 years or so, we got involved in the Microsoft .NET wave, and developed some nifty workflow-based technology to manage chronic disease "care pathways" (essentially clinical business processes). We were particularly interested in scenarios where there are multiple organizations involved in the care of the patient, and where high-volume, high-resolution imaging is a key component in that care provision.

Pretty early on, we learned that diabetes is a disease that clearly fit our problem domain.

There are 21m diabetic patients in the USA alone, and more than 70 people go blind every day in America, because of a complication of the disease called "diabetic retinopathy".

The complications of diabetes occur because poor blood glucose control gradually degrades the whole cardiovascular system. At its worst, this causes things like the heart and kidney failure which are common causes of death in diabetic patients.

In the eye, the damage to the blood vessels causes tiny hemorrhages. When they begin to occur, patients often don't notice any loss in vision. These go on to form larger lesions which kill the light-sensitive cells and slowly destroy sight - eventually causing total blindness. Believe it or not, diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the working age population (in the Western world - and rapidly on the increase elsewhere).

Unfortunately, most patients do not get the annual eye exam that would allow early intervention, arrest the process, and save their vision - perhaps extending their sight-life by many years; in large part this is because the process is gradual, and people are very good at ignoring a problem in the early stages.

Although the patient will likely visit their family doctor on a regular basis, for their general diabetic care, these eye exams have traditionally been available only if they visit their ophthalmologist. And when the problem is severe enough for them to think of going to the eye doctor, it is probably already too late.

Which is where our technology comes in. In a nutshell, what we do is to bring the digital imaging technology into the primary care environment, and link it up to the experts in the ophthalmology world, in a way that is secure, reliable, and manageable for all concerned.

So, where are we now? In the last few years we have grown our revenues considerably, and in the process we have become the leading vendor of Diabetic Retinopathy Screening software to the UK National Health Service, helping over 1.3 million of the UK's 2 million diabetic patients to receive the care that they need - and that number is growing all the time.

This year, we're expanding our operations in the United States, and have recently introduced the Retasure Network - a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS) offering of our technology to Primary Care Doctors, who can now provide similar Diabetic Retinopathy Risk Assessment services to their diabetic patients, all within the Medicare-funded environment.

So, that's what I'm all about.

I've got a number of topics already on my "must post" list - "What 'startup' really means", "Making technology ready for SaaS", "What's SaaS, and what's just Service", "HIPAA, STARK and other murky water", "Technology, Ambition and Resource" are the top five. I hope that you find something of interest here.