Gather all required figures surrounding potential market entry

[gtallen1187]

I've had a few conversations surrounding this topic recently, and my takeaway from all of them has been that we need to have some concrete figures surrounding our potential target customers and market entry strategy. Here are a few questions that i think i can do a better job of answering:

• Our target market is healthcare developers, but we need to be more specific here.
  • The easy sell will be towards smaller EMR developers who build provider-facing applications, since providers and their employers will be the ones demanding these algorithms be included in the products they purchase. But how big exactly is this market? Where is it trending?
  • I think the answer to the last question here is that this market is slowly getting smaller, as more and more EMR companies drop out of the picture as Meaningful Use gets harder and the industry leaders get bigger (stemming from conversions). Whether this is true or not, we still need hard numbers here.
• What type of healthcare applications would be considered provider-facing? I don't think this is limited to EMRs, but we need to understand where all of our provider-facing opportunities are.
• Are we necessarily limited to provider-facing? Is there a consumer demand for the results of these models? Better yet, if there isn't one now, will there be one in the future?
  • My initial answer to this question is that there _will_ be a consumer demand for the resulting scores of these models. Insurance companies have started showing patients their individual compliance status for various quality measures, which are meant to function as a health indicator, potentially encouraging patients to seek preventative treatment. If patients are starting to demand visibility into their quality measure results, it stands to reason that they will eventually start asking to see their calculated likelihood of developing a diabetic complication as well.
  • Regardless, we need more concrete figures here.

This is just a starting point, but please feel free to add to this list if there are items here that you feel are in need of a more in-depth explanation.

:sunglasses:

[gtallen1187]

Quick stat: As of today's date, there are _2,642_ EMRs that are certified for stage 2 Meaningful Use. That number is significantly larger than my original estimation, which is a good thing :grinning:

[brendanf22]

I just did a quick search looking for API's that are for EMR's/healthcare specifically... I didn't find much.

@gtallen1187 Do you know of any off the top of your head? I'd like to know who our colleagues are.

[gtallen1187]

Two come to mind off the top of my head:

• TrueVault - they provide a HIPAA compliant, encrypted, yet searchable database-as-a-service to people wanting to build healthcare apps.
• Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO) - They provide a search engine for ICD codes (codes used to classify medical conditions). @matthewplunkett's company uses them in their EMR, as do many others.

I'm sure i could find more if i spent time searching, but these are the two that jump out at me.

[brendanf22]

Awesome, thanks. I'll look into these guys a bit more and I'll post another other services I come across here.

[gtallen1187]

@HealthAPI/owners,

Found an incredibly applicable article today: What's Really Killing Healthcare Startups

While a pessimistic article, i think it actually does a great job of illustrating the opportunity for a product like this to succeed. The first thing it hits on is a general lack of product/market fit by many new entrants into the healthcare tech startup realm. I tend to agree with this sentiment - every day you can read about some new product that "makes it easier to find doctors" or "lets providers more easily connect with patients". Yet many of them seem to be betting the farm on a product with a marginally different feature set from their incredibly entrenched competition.

This systems integration challenge actually works to our advantage. For these companies, we would be a way out; an alternate option to weigh against an otherwise expensive, time-consuming integration with some larger, likely black-boxed analytics incumbent.

Just some food for thought.

And... i'm out.

[gtallen1187]

@HealthAPI/owners,

Another relevant article: Your New Medical Team

[gtallen1187]

@HealthAPI/team - trillion dollar opportunity, according to TechCrunch