This post was originally featured on EMRandHIPAA.
We are witnessing a dramatic unbundling of the services that power business. Almost every aspect of business can be unbundled into a monthly service.
My startup, Pristine, runs on a number of unbundled cloud services that until recently, would have traditionally been outsourced to HR firms or mega-IT companies. We run Pristine on ZenPayroll, RelateIQ, Google Apps, Expensify,Maxwell Health, Xero, Resumator, MediaTemple and more. Similarly, we’ve built our flagship service, EyeSight, on top of a broad array of development tools and services (check out the Pristine Engineering Blog to learn more about how the sausage is made). We’ve made it a priority to invent and do as little as possible by utilizing 3rd party stacks and services everywhere possible.
Healthcare is not immune to this trend. There are a number of companies that are unbundling health IT entrepreneurship:
- Catalyze – HIPAA compliant hosting and data APIs as a service
- Accountable – HIPAA compliance and training as a service
- Validic – quantified-self data as a service
- Allscripts Developer Program – EMR APIs and distribution as a service
- AthenaHealth Marketplace – EMR APIs and distribution as a service
- Greenway Marketplace – EMR APIs and distribution as a service
- Twilio - Messaging and telephony APIs as a service
- Capsule / iSirona - medical device integration as a service
- SureScripts – eRX as a service
- TigerText – HIPAA compliant messaging as a service
This list should be 10x longer than it is. With all of the capital and startups entering the health IT space, companies providing the infrastructure to accelerate growth will thrive. As the old saying goes, “During a gold rush, sell pickaxes.” The companies listed above are selling pickaxes to proverbial gold miners.
I’ll conclude this post with some areas that can be commoditized as a service. Feel free to leave comments on other areas or companies that I missed.
- Interoperability as a service (in lieu of HL7)
- HIPAA compliant videostreaming as a service
- HIPAA compliant image / video sending as a service
- Analytics as a service