n app for patients sticking to their pill schedules, an app for accessing electronic medical records, and a dashboard for doctors looking to collect clinical data – those are just some of the ideas Veronika Litinski has seen during her time in the digital healthcare field.

For the past eight years, Litinski has worked in the MaRS Discovery District as an advisor to startups building mobile apps and other technologies for the healthcare industry. She left that role in November 2013 to move to Hamilton, Ont. to found KononaHealth, an accelerator for startups looking to make their mark in healthcare. The accelerator is currently taking in applications for its program, and it expects to close a funding round by the end of this quarter.

While there are a lot of great ideas out there, the difficulty in combining IT and healthcare is that it’s already such a well-established space, with big vendors who built IT systems for hospitals and other medical facilities, Litinski says.

And for a new company that has yet to demonstrate its product is fully viable, trying to make it in a long-mature market can be daunting at best. For example, in the healthcare industry, bringing a new product to market will often require months of testing – something most startups can’t usually afford to wait for, she points out. It’s an issue that many healthcare-focused startups face, and one that she’ll be discussing as a speaker at the Mobile Healthcare Summit in Toronto on Jan. 28.

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