Deciding between Family Funded & Healthcare Business Funded Business Models
After identifying software that people want and need, a software product or business needs to choose the most strategic way to fund the growth and development of that software or application. There are many impacts and tradeoffs when deciding if the software should serve customers indirectly via a supporting business or if the software should serve customers more directly, where the customers support development and growth.
Because businesses typically have more resources, reach, and finances than individual users, an overwhelming number of start-ups choose to create products for companies that already have customers. Starting out selling to companies is understandable and potentially the right strategy for many start-ups. The benefit is that the product can reach the market quicker. The tradeoffs are the start-up’s product may only reach some who could benefit, and future features are defined by the business customer rather than the end-user. Said differently, the start-up can find it challenging to answer the question, “Is the customer the business or the end user?”
After finishing research on the issues facing families caring for medically complex members, studying the current solutions in the market, and completing a beta program with 29 families, we learned how families want to use their health information to benefit their families. This has not yet been solved for families because when a startup chooses to support a business to reach families, it limits the ability to reach all families. Families today have to have the right insurance, the right disease, the right health network, or the right kind of mobile phone or watch to access their health information.
The closer we get to launching Primary Record to families, the more we believe we are making the right decision. Below is a list of the key benefits of choosing this strategy for our customers.
The Benefits of Serving Families First
- Remove barriers to accessing the application.
At Primary Record, we believe that access to an application shouldn’t be determined by your healthcare provider, insurance company, or companies advertising products to you to use our application and service. We believe in helping a family collect and collaborate on their loved ones’ healthcare stories. - Families can develop a complete history.
Because a family can document the history from multiple providers that may or may not have online patient portals, these providers could be non-traditional and, by nature, would not be presented in any state or federal health information exchange networks. This helps families more easily share their more complete and consistent story with anyone new to the family. - Families have more transparent privacy controls.
The family chooses who accesses and can edit the consolidated medical profile for their loved one. The family can see who accessed what and when. And the family knows that notes and comments are not stored in a system owned by providers, insurance companies, or advertisers. When families grant HIPAA consent to share their information, they don’t have visibility into who sees and uses their information beyond just that provider. - Primary Record is directly accountable to families.
The service needs to meet the family’s needs and be useful to the family, or the family can choose a different service. - Families would have input into the application features.
Adding to point #4, all Primary Record customers can directly access and influence the product roadmap and feature enhancements rather than providers, insurance companies, or advertisers. - Develop a valuable asset that can benefit the family.
In the not-too-distant future, there will be ways for families to share their information and participate in studies based on the quality of their background and health history data. Future opportunities are identified where families can use their health data to monetarily benefit from sharing with clinical trials and research. This is in contrast to advertisers and insurance companies benefiting from your family’s health information.
Summary
Primary Record made a strategic business decision when deciding to service customers directly and share the cost of the premium features with families. This decision is innovative and disruptive. We believe that healthcare information and history should be democratized and not controlled by any one healthcare provider or insurance company. In addition, removing barriers to accessing software like Primary Record is more important than giving up control to a company to decide. Because of this decision, there are many additional benefits, like robust privacy controls and input to the product roadmap, that can’t be guaranteed by a business paying for the software.
