Why Healthcare Needs Platforms
Imagine you go to a doctor who already had your vitals from your wearable device and a report from another specialist who reviewed your ECG generated by another device. The doctor already had your patient history and gives you a prescription which is then automatically fulfilled by a pharmacy, billed to your insurance company, and arrives at your doorstep. The chances are that such experience will not be offered by one giant monolith system, but will likely be made possible by an ecosystem of multiple players working together seamlessly. Enter platforms.
What is a platform?
A platform is an enabler of an ecosystem of suppliers and customers. In tech world, the suppliers are often the 3rd party developers building on top of a platform and developing for the users of the platform. A platform can be beneficial to its participants because it helps build relationship between the developers and the users. But it’s much more than that. A platform allows the developers to leverage technology, data liquidity and user base offered by the platform to provide innovative products and integrated experiences to its users.
What a platform can do
One of the most popular platforms we know of today is “App Store”. After Steve Jobs launched iPhone in 2007, Apple also launched its “App Store” a year later for the iPhone. The App Store emerged as a new “platform” and created a whole new “ecosystem” of developers and applications that didn’t exist before. With the Apps available on the App Store, consumers could now get more things done and get things done in a completely new way (“There’s an App for everything!”). The creation of an App Store in initial days was a game changer for a new generation of software developers too who could go beyond the dot-com websites to create a new set of software applications that leveraged both the internet and a new hardware device. Now you can discover spots visited by your friends or you can find nearby people to date. This new market of the app ecosystem accelerated software product innovation in a short span because it provided a new way especially for developers to get access to not only an Software Development Kit (SDK) to develop apps but also a wide scale distribution channel to immediately reach millions of consumers at once. This eventually also led to the rise of the Android Play Store and other platforms which offered their own app stores. The impact of the app stores is manifold on our daily lives as well as on businesses. This was like creating a totally new sector in the economy leading to productivity gains in the overall economy.
Why we need platforms in healthcare
The reason platforms are so powerful is that a platform unlocks creativity and ingenuity of its participant developers that far exceeds what any individual company or even the platform creator itself can achieve on its own. To put it simply, a platform in the software world allows the users of the platform to get more things done more efficiently. Software itself is a great enabler in healthcare delivery. But if we were to get more things done more efficiently in healthcare, we need platforms to create and grow ecosystems of developers and applications. Knowing how healthcare behaves differently may also provide some hints about how to build a platform in healthcare.
Building a platform in healthcare
So what does it take to build a platform? A typical platform enables an ecosystem where the 3rd party developers get access to technology, data liquidity and user base to leverage and build solutions for the users. There exist platforms in other industries which provide all these ingredients to their developers: (i) technology, (ii) data liquidity and (iii) user base.
However, such platform in healthcare has been hard to build. Healthcare is complex and full of regulations — mostly for the right reasons. Let’s analyze the above ingredients in the context of healthcare delivery to understand how healthcare behaves differently.
The first ingredient for a developer ecosystem is technology. Just like iOS and Android SDKs provided by Apple and Google make it easier for developers to build apps for consumers, a software toolkit or any type of tools in digital health can help developers build for healthcare providers. It’s encouraging to see how a new generation of developers offering tools to other developers serving healthcare providers. An example for this is a new category of vendors offering APIs that other developers can integrate readily to offer data security and privacy compliance like HIPAA to their customers instead of developers having to build it from scratch.
The second ingredient of data liquidity is perhaps the most critical ingredient that is lacking in healthcare to build a thriving ecosystem of developers. Data liquidity in software is what allows one piece of software to communicate with another piece of software. A calendar event automatically gets created on your Samsung phone from an email you received on the Outlook email app and then you also receive an alert from Google Maps reminding you it’s time to leave based on the traffic condition on your route! This is possible because of the data liquidity offered by software APIs, protocols, and other channels. We don’t have this level of interoperability in healthcare, unfortunately, even after some advances such as FHIR data standard. Without frictionless communication and exchange of data, the growth of a platform is stunted. In healthcare, for example, the benefits of AI and data analytics cannot be reaped if patient records are stored in silos and not shared across healthcare providers.
The third ingredient of use base offered by a platform is the most direct form of benefit a developer could receive. Access to a large user base on a platform will drive the product adoption by the users and thereby further growth of the ecosystem. In healthcare, this may mean, for example, a mental health solution finding the right patient with the right provider at the right time at a scale. Having access to an initial user base is crucial because it can kick off a virtuous cycle of innovation based on the use feedback.
Combining all of the above ingredients in a platform is much more powerful than the having ingredients separately because it offers much more leverage to the participants of a platform. A hospital appointment system is integrated with Electronic Health Record is fine. But what if you could predict a patient’s health condition before it happens, update the patient, inform their care providers, get prior authorization from the insurance for the treatment, refer the patient to another provider, order the medicines and even book a cab or ambulance based on the appointment to take the patient to a hospital. Many emerging platforms in healthcare offer one or some of these ingredients and are helping to enhance the healthcare delivery. But if all these ingredients are offered to developers by a single platform, it can grow a new ecosystem of developers that has the power to redefine how healthcare is delivered. This leads to new use cases, new applications and new behaviors, and the outcome can be transformative for everyone involved! We have not seen such power of a true platform because they have hardly existed in healthcare. But it’s starting to happen. Maybe the time is now.
