To Survive, Health Care Data Providers Need to Stop Selling Data

Most data-driven healthcare IT (HCIT) providers aren’t going to survive. Their business models are at serious risk of failure as health data becomes more widely collected and freely shared. To beat those odds, they need to evolve dramatically, and fast, to a point where they are not selling data but providing insight. There are two common ways to provide insight: one is to focus on specific use cases, and the other is to focus on particular patient populations. The marketplace is rapidly moving in this direction. For example, Proteus Digital Health is engaging with health systems to provide insights into health patterns and treatment effectiveness for patients with uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes. The late economist and marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” In health care, providers don’t want data, they want solutions that lower costs and improve outcomes. The HCIT firms that deliver those solutions are the ones that will be around in five years’ time.