PicnicHealth (YC S14) raises $60m to build patient-centered research datasets
3 points • 0 comments
@troyastorino | Hacker News
From 7/9/2011, 2:16:00 PM till now, @troyastorino has achieved 451 Karma Points with the contribution count of 117.
Recent @troyastorino Activity
PicnicHealth (YC S14) raises $60m Series C to make medical data work better
8 points • 0 comments
Echoing other comments, the issue might be as simple as not being at the right company.
Interviewing elsewhere seems like the right thing to do. I'm confident there are environments out there where other engineers would challenge you.
It's possible that could be the case at my company, PicnicHealth. If you'd be interested in chatting, reach out (email in profile)
Cybertruck + Catamaran = Cybercat
2 points • 0 comments
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time, Onsite, Remote (US timezones) | https://picnichealth.com | Can transfer visas
PicnicHealth is building healthcare's missing data layer, making medical data patient-centric, computable, and complete. We collect and structure medical records for patients, empowering them to monitor and control their care. Patients can consent to share their anonymized data with life sciences researchers working to better understand disease progression and treatment.
We just announced our $25m Series B and are growing quickly. We're hiring for front-end, full-stack, data engineering, ML, data science, and product, among other roles. Join kind, focused, mission-driven team using machine learning and modern software development practices to improve health.
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time, Onsite, Remote | https://picnichealth.com | Can transfer visas
PicnicHealth works with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their medical records, empowering them to monitor and control their care via a personal health timeline. Through partnerships with life sciences companies, we aggregate and organize data from groups of research volunteers, which helps power some of today’s most cutting-edge medical research.
We also just announced our Series A & B funding rounds (totaling $35M) today.
We're hiring for:
* Data Engineers
* Site Reliability Engineers
* Engineering Managers
* Front-End Engineers
* Full-Stack Engineers
* Data Scientists
* Product Managers
And more. Check out a full list: https://picnichealth.com/careers
Tech Stack: Our main web service is in Node.js, and most other services are in Python (mostly machine learning services, using Keras, Tensorflow, etc). Our frontend is React + Redux, database is PostgreSQL, and services run in a Kubernetes cluster hosted on Google Cloud Platform (Google Kubernetes Engine).
PicnicHealth (YC S14) lands $40M to accelerate patient-centric medical research
8 points • 0 comments
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time, Onsite | https://picnichealth.com | Can transfer existing visas
PicnicHealth works with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their medical records, empowering them to monitor and control their care via a personal health timeline. Through partnerships with biotech, genomics, and pharma companies, we also aggregate and organize data from big groups of volunteers, which helps power some of today’s most cutting-edge medical research.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/picnichealth
You can see all of our open roles here: https://grnh.se/3b566ba92
* Data Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=465624300...
* DevOps Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429762800...
* Engineering Manager: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728600...
* Front-End Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429755900...
* Full-Stack Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429692900...
* Machine Learning Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429760100...
* Data Scientist / Biostatistician: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=466020200...
* Product Manager, Patient Product: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728800...
Tech Stack: Our main web service is in Node.js, and most other services are in Python (mostly machine learning services, using Keras, Tensorflow, etc). Our frontend is React + Redux, database is PostgreSQL, and services run in a Kubernetes cluster hosted on Google Cloud Platform (Google Kubernetes Engine).
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time, Onsite | https://picnichealth.com
PicnicHealth works with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their medical records, empowering them to monitor and control their care via a personal health timeline. Through partnerships with biotech, genomics, and pharma companies, we also aggregate and organize data from big groups of volunteers, which helps power some of today’s most cutting-edge medical research.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/picnichealth
You can see all of our open roles here: https://grnh.se/3b566ba92
* Engineering Manager: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728600...
* Front-End Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429755900...
* Full-Stack Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429692900...
* Machine Learning Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429760100...
* Product Manager, Patient Product: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728800...
Tech Stack: Our main web service is in Node.js, and most other services are in Python (mostly machine learning services, using Keras, Tensorflow, etc). Our frontend is React + Redux, database is PostgreSQL, and services run in a Kubernetes cluster hosted on Google Cloud Platform (Google Kubernetes Engine).
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time, Onsite | https://picnichealth.com
PicnicHealth works with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their medical records, empowering them to monitor and control their care via a personal health timeline. Through partnerships with biotech, genomics, and pharma companies, we also aggregate and organize data from big groups of volunteers, which helps power some of today’s most cutting-edge medical research.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/picnichealth
You can see all of our open roles here: https://grnh.se/3b566ba92
* Engineering Manager: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728600...
* Front-End Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429755900...
* Full-Stack Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429692900...
* Machine Learning Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429760100...
* Product Designer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429763300...
* Product Manager, Patient Product: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728800...
* DevOps Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429762800...
Tech Stack: Our main web service is in Node.js, and most other services are in Python (mostly machine learning services, using Keras, Tensorflow, etc). Our frontend is React + Redux, database is PostgreSQL, and services run in a Kubernetes cluster hosted on Google Cloud Platform (Google Kubernetes Engine).
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | San Francisco, CA | Full-Time, Onsite | https://picnichealth.com
PicnicHealth works with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their medical records, empowering them to monitor and control their care via a personal health timeline. Through partnerships with biotech, genomics, and pharma companies, we also aggregate and organize data from big groups of volunteers, which helps power some of today’s most cutting-edge medical research.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/picnichealth
You can see all of our open roles here: https://grnh.se/3b566ba92
* Engineering Manager: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728600...
* Front-End Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429755900...
* Full-Stack Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429692900...
* Machine Learning Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429760100...
* DevOps Engineer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429762800...
* Product Designer: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=429763300...
* Product Manager, Patient Product: https://team.picnichealth.com/careerdetails?gh_jid=437728800...
Tech Stack: Our main web service is in Node.js, and most other services are in Python (mostly machine learning services, using Keras, Tensorflow, etc). Our frontend is React + Redux, database is PostgreSQL, and services run in a Kubernetes cluster hosted on Google Cloud Platform (Google Kubernetes Engine).
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | Design, Front-End, Full-Stack, Eng. Manager | SF | ONSITE, FULL-TIME, VISA | https://team.picnichealth.com/jobs?src=hn
Picnic’s mission is to structure the world’s medical data to make it useful. We work directly with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their complete medical records, giving them with control over their care. Beyond serving patients directly, we partner with biotech, genomics, and pharma companies who sponsor PicnicHealth accounts for research volunteers. Through this work we’re building the data sets that power some of today’s most cutting edge medical research. Our stack is React/Redux, Node, Python, Keras, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes.
Our product has literally saved some of our users' lives by unearthing issues in their medical records. We're growing rapidly — on pace for 4x team this year. Our team is smart, hard-working, and passionate about fixing healthcare.
America is not a democracy — it is a constitutional republic with democratic elements. America has democratic election of representatives, the the lawmaking is done by those representatives, not directly. California’s proposition system is an example of true direct democracy.
The constitutional part is important too — it limits what people, and their representatives, can do even if they have a majority.
In case you didn't know, something very close to what you're describing happened, and makes your comment seem extremely insensitive.
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | DevOps, Security, Back-End, Front-End, Product, ML | SF | ONSITE, FULL-TIME | https://team.picnichealth.com/jobs?src=hn Picnic’s mission is to structure the world’s medical data and make it useful. We work directly with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their complete medical records, giving them with control over their care. Beyond serving patients directly, we partner with biotech, genomics, and pharma companies who sponsor PicnicHealth accounts for research volunteers. Through this work we’re building the data sets that power some of today’s most cutting edge medical research. Our stack is React/Redux, Node, Python, Keras, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes.
Our product has literally saved some of our users' lives by unearthing issues in their medical records. We're growing rapidly — on pace for 20x this year. Our team is smart, hard-working, and passionate about fixing healthcare.
Patients do have rights to the records, but as described, it's really hard to actually get them and keep them in a useful, accessible format.
We've chimed in a few other parts of comments, but at PicnicHealth this is exactly what we're working on. If you're interested in fixing this problem we'd love to talk.
Adding on as one of the PicnicHealth founders.
Unfortunately, the kind of experiences described are extremely common in transfer-of-care settings. When we were starting PicnicHealth, my grandfather was in-and-out of several different ICUs. Preventable mistakes when moving between facilities and providers — inadvertently changed medication dosages, missed therapy regimens, un-transferred test results — created health emergencies that kept pushing him back further and further from recovery. He ultimately passed away. We had these problems around information management and transfer even though my dad (my grandfather's son) is a doctor, and was continuously in touch with the different care teams. Without a central, complete source of information, things will always get missed.
Patients and doctors deserve solutions to this problem today. Like the author said, you can only piece together a patient's medical history if you're willing to deal with records in any form, including faxing and scanning paper and mailing CDs. It's hard, dirty work, but it's the only way to get everything together. PicnicHealth does this so patients don't have to. And gathering the records is actually just the first part —you need to structure and normalize information in the different records so it's possible to do things like view trends and use control-find.
Full electronic interoperability is slowly coming, but it's been slowly coming for more than 20 years. I would be shocked if in 10 years faxes aren't still being sent. We need to push to make interoperability happen as quickly as possible, but in the meantime patients and their care can't wait.
The problems with the CCD (having so many different ways to represent the same thing, having a different flavor for each system) are unfortunately passed down to new iterations of healthcare standards. New standards (like FHIR) are designed to fix problems with older standards, but then when it comes to implementation they are built to be backward compatible with the older standards, and so inherit some of the same problems (in this case, the ambiguity of representation).
PicnicHealth (YC S14) | Design, Front-End, ML, Full-Stack | SF | ONSITE, FULL-TIME, VISA Picnic’s mission is to structure the world’s medical data to make it useful. We work directly with patients to collect, digitize, and manage their complete medical records, giving them with control over their care. Beyond serving patients directly, we partner with biotech, genomics, and pharma companies who sponsor PicnicHealth accounts for research volunteers. Through this work we’re building the data sets that power some of today’s most cutting edge medical research.
Our stack is React/Redux, Node, Python, Keras, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes.
Our product has literally saved some of our users' lives by unearthing issues in their medical records. We're growing rapidly — on pace for 20x this year. Our team is smart, hard-working, and passionate about fixing healthcare.
Learn more at team.picnichealth.com/jobs?src=hn
The data model is a big part of the problem. There are lots of different ways to encode the same information within HL7. People refer to different "flavors" of HL7, different ones for different implementations (and implementations are not just vendor specific, but site specific — EHR software is very heavily customized for each health system). Add to that doctors and nurses entering information in their own ways within a given health system (since the software isn't very clear or usable), and the data that's getting transferred is a huge mess.
Beyond that, a lot of the most important information is encoded in free text fields, and so isn't directly analyzable. And even when information is mapped to codes from standard medical ontologies, there's no guarantee that when that information is transferred in HL7 formats it includes the code from the ontology.
It's not at all clear what the optimal way to structure medical information should be, so it's no surprise that there's a huge amount of variance out in the world. HL7 is quite old (v2 was made in 1989), and every new variant has to support the existing variants. EHRs were originally designed around billing and administrative workflows, so it's also not surprising that the data structures aren't great for analyzing data or treating patients.
site design / logo © 2022 Box Piper