Telemedicine: Who Ya' Gonna Call?
Brad Lindemann, President/CEO

This is Part 3 of a 3 part series originally entitled: Who's Going To Amazon Healthcare

As with any "change the world" undertaking, getting started is never easy. Amazon didn't become the second most valuable retailer in the world ($81 billion market cap) by initially offering any product to any customer anywhere at any time. They started off selling books online out of Mr. Bezos' garage. As they expanded into other products, they fast became public enemy #1 to every retailer on the planet. This realization gave birth to Amazon's Merchant Partnership program which seemingly gives them unlimited growth potential. While still competitors, Merchant Partners embrace amazon.com as a strategic distribution partner with reach very difficult to achieve on their own.

Amazon did not invent the Internet. They simply leveraged it to become the first retail super power exclusively peddling its wares in cyberspace. Many followed their lead, including bricks and mortar retailers who feared losing market share to Internet upstarts, as well as traditional competitors who were early Internet adopters. By comparison, the field of telemedicine is where Internet retailing was in the early 1990's. There's a lot of experimentation going on, but no one has emerged as the 800 pound telemedicine gorilla. While the idea of "IU TeleHealth Services" is certainly intriguing and eventually inevitable, the gorilla is likely to emerge from less traditional roots, as Amazon did.

If They Will Come…Who Will Build It?

What about THE Exchange? Who's most likely to build the network that the entire world will rely upon to secure, store and transmit highly confidential and potentially life-saving personal health information? Surely no government would be entrusted with such a mission critical system connecting every nation on earth. Some healthcare systems (public and private) have the resources to pull it off, however, other providers would be reticent to share their patient data with what could become a formidable competitor. Certainly the large outsourcer/systems integrators like IBM and Accenture could handle the challenge, but they may prefer to re-invent the wheel with all of their clients versus building a global solution they could all piggyback upon. For the same reason, Cisco Systems will likely be content to sell its products to all telemedicine providers versus becoming one.

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"We become what we think about"

~ Earl Nightingale