While healthcare payments get bundled, the EMR industry appears to be coming unbundled.
Brian Manning, the director of strategic sales at ZocDoc, pointed out in a recent blog post that the same phenomenon happening to mega consumer internet sites like Facebook and Craigslist is happening to the electronic medical records market, too.
Craigslist found success by bundling a bunch of web services together in one place. Now, a small army of startups is trying to dethrone Craigslist by creating simple but valuable services that take just one function of the site and do it better.
Similarly, in health IT, electronic medical records companies have so far tried to be the jack of all trades that do a bunch of things, like manage clinical data, patient communication, scheduling, billing, referrals and population health, in one place. Now, startups are entering the space and biting off small pieces of what EMRs are doing by doing it better.
Jonathan Govette of referralMD created this graphic based off of a similar graphic for Craigslist put together by venture capitalist Andrew Parker back in 2010. In his own blog post, Govette supposes that as more healthcare data gets moved to the cloud, more startups like ZocDoc, PatientPay and SureScripts will be able to do a better job than EMR could do by itself.
Shifts in the market won’t happen quite as easily in health as in the consumer web industry, though, because of the cost, efforts and risks associated with switching health IT vendors, Manning writes.
But with the dollars that are flowing into healthcare focused venture capital and the excitement around those investments, it’s only a matter of time before we see this unbundling accelerate and see more value flowing to providers and patients. And that’s a good thing for our healthcare system.
