Health 2.0 Redux
PHRs are so back, baby.
PHRs (Personal Health Records) are so back. What else is back? To answer that question, I threw back to the startup categories that made the main stage of the 2011 Health 2.0 Conference (kids, this was the place to be, way before HLTH and ViVE were even zygotes) to see which were featured back then, went dormant, and are now rising like a flock of glorious phoenixes from the ashes, mostly in AI-native form.
I chose 2011 on the basis of it being the year in which my personal favorite 2010's era PHR / quantified self app, the *original* 100Plus, raised its seed round.
tl;dr - Pretty much all of the 2011 startup categories map to 2025-era activity. Most, if not all, of these categories are looking more viable now than they did 15 years ago for a variety of reasons, e.g.
infrastructure that didn't exist before
novel reimbursement rails
supply-side constraints that have reached a tipping point
regulatory change that has finally started to play out
paradigm shift from reactive to proactive care
step change in consumer demand for preventative health and tools (e.g., GLP-1s)
greater availability of early-stage capital
AI / LLMs
So what’s old is new again, but with a confluence of tailwinds that constitute a much stronger “why now.” The categories and mappings are as follows:
There are also several prominent categories that weren’t featured during that era of Health 2.0 that are active now, including RCM, modern health plans, home-based care, and value-based care enablement - these were just less of a thing back then amongst VC-backed players (but were quite active for PE-backed, interestingly).
All this to say - "There are no bad ideas, just bad timing." It’s never been a better time to build in healthcare - this is the industry that will benefit the most from AI, the space is showing signs of evolution that mirror the patterns of earlier eras of the broader tech industry, and traction levels are unprecedented.
Keep at it, builders.
Courtesy of The Wayback Machine, with a shout out to Matt Holt for seeing the future with Health 2.0.
Special thanks to Eva Steinman and Jane Rhee for their contributions.