Chilmark Podcast–Platform Thinking for Healthcare: A Discussion with Vince Kuraitis and Randy Williams

Dr. Randy Williams and I were interviewed by Jody Ranck of Chilmark Research. We discuss platform thinking for healthcare. Chilmark’s article contains a link to the podcast, a summary, and an “AI-generated” transcript.

A few choice quotes:

Vince: “EHRs are the poster child for a lack of platform thinking in health care”

Randy: “traditional business models really produce products and services, and they do that through taking the production side, integrating that and ultimately selling and delivering a product or a service to a customer….platform businesses really contrast with these traditional pipeline businesses by unlocking new sources of value both on the creation side of a transaction but also on the consumption side. Their function is really to facilitate matches or to consummate exchanges of goods and services, thereby creating value for all the parties.”

Vince: “We find that in health care, a lot of folks think about platforms as technology, and that’s not inaccurate, but it’s limiting…the sine que non of platform business strategy and business models is to understand and create network effects.”

Randy: “A.I. is really probably the next frontier of digital platform transformation in health care”

Vince: “So you look in the App Store with Epic and they’ve got 572. As of my last count, Cerner has about 100. And is that a lot or a little? Well, they’ve been very late. They came into the App Store arena about 2017 and compare 500 apps even to three hundred and fifty thousand mHealth applications that are out there. We know there are [over 1,000 health IT] companies, there are thousands of digital health companies. I think that [they] could have made a much more significant effort. Or as my colleague Seth Joseph would have described it, you need to think of yourself not as software, but you think of yourself as a marketplace.”

Randy: With virtual care, “what you’re seeing…is a battle over kind of who is going to own the primary relationship with the patient, the consumer and ultimately a population.”

Randy: There is an “opportunity for hybrids to emerge [in] places where incumbent health care entities begin to embrace some of the market pressure that they’re seeing from Big Tech or Big Retail, or from investor backed disruptive technology companies — and begin to develop either their own platform business strategies or embrace and partner with [others].”

Here’s Jody’s summary of Key Takeaways:

• Platform business models from big tech are beginning to demonstrate their relevance in healthcare and challenge the traditional, linear value creation form of business model.
• Many view EHRs as likely incumbent candidates for platforms, however we may see more activity from virtual care platforms and collaborative platforms composed of health systems.
• Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are often a key component of platform business models – though not always (ie Epic) – and the use of AI as a central component of digital transformation is becoming more standardized.

The podcast, summary, and transcript are here.