I realize it's been quite a while since I taught - or was in school myself - but I'm distressed…
Morning Headlines 10/29/18
Epic chops down App Orchard fees
Epic will reduce its fees for listing third-party software in its App Orchard.
Individuals Charged With Defrauding Non-Profit Health-Care System
A federal grand jury indicts a former IT employee of Catholic Health Initiatives for allegedly issuing $72 million in phony purchase orders to a co-conspirator’s IT consulting firm for integration services, then splitting the take.
Cerner (CERN) Q3 2018 Results – Earnings Call Transcript
The company expects its DoD and VA business to drive growth as financially-challenged providers and lack of regulatory incentives reduce private sector market urgency.
HHS CTO’s office to support Indian Health Service IT modernization study
The CTO’s office at HHS will support consulting firm Emerging Sun in a research project focused on updating the Indian Health Service’s Resource and Patient Management System.
So maybe I’m ignorant or misunderstanding the whole Epic App Store but I have no idea how the economics/business model of that is supposed to work. It seems like they lazily copied the smartphone App Store model since we’re all familiar with that but there are several key differences between a smartphone and an EMR:
1. There are over a billion smartphones in use across the world today. Even if we liken Epic to Apple (they both have similar parallels in their industry), Apple has over 700 million active iPhones. Epic has 300-400 customers.
2. Apple app store is geared towards consumers whereas Epic Orchard is geared towards enterprises. Those are two completely different customers and it’s a poor assumption that what works for one works for another.
3. Apps for the iPhone have a serious monetization problem – most rely on ads (which Epic doesn’t have) or a freemium model (i.e. one time payment) which isn’t sustainable for a company since there isn’t a long-term reliable revenue source. It’s been a tough sell to consumers to subscribe to an app service even in the smartphone industry, how do these healthcare tech companies expect to do it when the industry they are mirroring haven’t even solved it yet?
4. Even if we ignore all those issues above and an app becomes successful, what’s to say that Epic won’t develop similar functionality making your app obsolete?
These are just a few glaring holes I’ve thought of off the top of my head. I just don’t understand how the decision makers at Epic are seeing this from a business perspective and how they expect the App Store to be successful, can someone enlighten me as to what I’m not seeing?