Today in healthcare, platforms are understood mostly as “technology”. That’s not wrong, but it’s limiting. We want to offer you a more expansive view of platforms, and in turn, understand platforms as being more than just technology. This post is the third in our series on The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms. In this essay, we will: Explain why platform business models are NOT new; Share a survey of health plan execs that documents a view of platforms as “technology”; Explain how network effects are the North Star of platform business models and strategy; Expand your view of platforms beyond just “technology.”
Feature Articles
A Whirlwind Tour Of All The Connected Sites That Form The World Of Open Source Social Networks
By Bob Murphy | March 21, 2023
People want to communicate over the internet as easily as they do in real life, with similar protections but, potentially, farther reach. In other words, people want to be able to chat with a group of other people who aren't physically in the same location, and still maintain some control over who claims ownership of the conversation. In today's world, of course, a lot of companies have a lot to say about who owns the data you send back and forth over the world wide web. Most companies seem to feel they have the right to govern the way you communicate, how many people your message reaches, and so on. Open source, luckily, doesn't need to own your social life, and so appropriately it's open source developers who are delivering a social network that belongs, first and foremost, to you.
New Study Shows Patients Prefer Immediate Access to Test Results and have Unmet Information Needs
By Jordan Everson | March 20, 2023
A recent study of 8,000 patients that accessed their test results via an online patient portal found that more than 95% wanted to continue to immediately receive test results through their portal. That percentage stayed at 95% when focused on patients with non-normal results. These findings come amid concerns that the immediate release of test results could lead to patient distress when patients access test results before their physicians could contact them and help to interpret those results...since the ONC information blocking regulations became applicable to health care providers on April 5, 2021, a patient may be able to access test results in parallel to those results’ availability to the ordering clinician.
Let's Do Public Health Better
By Kim Bellard | February 27, 2023
Eric Reinhart, who describes himself as “a political anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and physician,” has had a busy month. He started with an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about “reconstructive justice,” then an op-ed in The New York Times on how our health care system is demoralizing the physicians who work in it, and then the two that caught my attention: companion pieces in The Nation and Stat News about reforming our public health “system” from a physician-driven one to a true community health one. He's preaching to my choir. I wrote almost five years ago: “We need to stop viewing public health as a boring, not glamorous, small part of our healthcare system, but, rather, as the bedrock of it, and of our health.” Dr. Reinhart pulls no punches about our public health system(s), or the people who lead them...
How Upstream Contributions Power Scientific Research
By Cara Delia, Leslie Hawthorn, and Jose Castillo Lema | February 3, 2023
Just as with software development, research under Horizon Europe promotes the adoption of sharing research outputs as early and widely as possible to citizen science, developing new indicators for evaluation research, and rewarding researchers. Horizon Europe emphasizes open science and open source technology. The program evolved from Horizon 2020, which provided financial support for research projects that promoted industrial competitiveness, advanced scientific excellence, or solved social challenges through the process of "open science." Open science is an approach to the scientific process based on open cooperative work, tools, and diffusing knowledge found in the Horizon Europe Regulation and Model Grant Agreement. This open science approach aligns with open source principles that provide a structure for such cooperation.
Open Source Software Is Transforming Healthcare
By Jimmy Ahern | January 12, 2023
In the summer of 2022, the UK government and NHS England published its Open Source Policy, stating that open source technology is: Particularly suitable for use within the healthcare industry where, through active collaboration between IT suppliers and user/clinicians communities, solutions can be honed to maximise benefits to delivery of health and social care. The public statement by NHS England is just the latest development in a broader trend: The wholehearted embrace of open source software by the healthcare sector. And no wonder; open source presents myriad opportunities for this most complex of industries, with potential solutions across various sub-sectors. Yes, open source is now powering everything from medical wearables to healthcare human resource management.
Some Barriers and Challenges to the CDC's Data Modernization Initiative
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | December 28, 2022
As we have discussed in earlier posts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) focused on improving the data management capacity of public health in the United States. The major focus of this initiative is on investments in both people as well as systems and data to improve public health response. Though Congress has appropriated a significant amount of funding for Federal and state, territorial, local, and tribal (STLT) public health agencies, there are some sizable barriers and challenges to seeing the vision for DMI come to fruition:
The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms (Part 3): Platform Thinking Expands from “Technology” to Business Model & Strategy
By Vince Kuraitis, JD/MBA, and Randy Williams, MD | December 21, 2022
A New Generation Of Tools For Open Source Vulnerability Management
By Vincent Danen | December 16, 2022
Product security incident response teams (PSIRTs) are teams of security professionals that work diligently behind the scenes to protect software products and services of companies. A PSIRT is a different breed than a computer security incident response team (CSIRT), those that tend to be called Information Security. The difference is simple but stark: a CSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect a company's infrastructure, data or users. A PSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect products a company builds, the most common being the discovery of a vulnerability or security defect, and subsequent actions to manage or remediate. Read More »
A Data Scientist's Guide To Open Source Community Analysis
By Cali Dolfi | December 20, 2022
In the golden age of data analysis, open source communities are not exempt from the frenzy around getting some big, fancy numbers onto presentation slides. Such information can bring even more value if you master the art of generating a well-analyzed question with proper execution. You might expect me, a data scientist, to tell you that data analysis and automation will inform your community decisions. It's actually the opposite. Use data analysis to build on your existing open source community knowledge, incorporate others, and uncover potential biases and perspectives not considered. You might be an expert at implementing community events, while your colleague is a wiz at all things code. As each of you develops visualizations within the context of your own knowledge, you both can benefit from that information.
The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms (Part 2): Pipe Scale vs. Platform Scale
By Vince Kuraitis, JD/MBA, and Randy Williams, MD | November 21, 2022
Platform businesses scale differently than traditional businesses. Platforms scale through network effects. In the previous post, we introduced and described a widely used metaphor: pipes vs. platforms. Traditional businesses are pipes. Their value chains are linear. Value is added at sequential stages before a final product or service is delivered to consumers at the end of the pipeline. Platforms do not produce goods or services themselves—they make connections among stakeholders and facilitate value exchange among those stakeholders. Value is created outside the platform. Both pipeline businesses and platform businesses strive to achieve scale—but the type of scale they strive for is vastly different. In this post, we’ll explain how pipeline businesses strive for economies of scale (on the supply side) and how platform businesses scale through network effects (on the demand side).
ONC HITAC Public Health Data Systems Task Force Releases Recommendations
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | November 18, 2022
On November 10, 2022 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) accepted and approved the recommendations of its ad hoc Public Health Data Systems Task Force. As discussed in an earlier post, the Task Force has been meeting since August 2022 and was charged with examining how improvements might be made in ONC certification rules for criteria related to public health data submission. In addition, and perhaps for the first time, the task force was also charged with developing recommendations related to the public health side of the equation: how public health data systems and/or standards might improve to ensure a smoother flow of information with clinical care. Read More »
How Open Source Powers Innovation
By Gordon Haff | November 16, 2022
Where do people come together to make cutting-edge invention and innovation happen?....What of open source software? Certainly, major projects are highly collaborative. Open source software also supports the kind of knowledge diffusion that, throughout history, has enabled the spread of at least incremental advances in everything from viticulture to blast furnace design in 19th-century England. That said, open source software, historically, had a reputation primarily for being good enough and cheaper than proprietary software. That's changed significantly, especially in areas like working with large volumes of data and the whole cloud-native ecosystem. This development probably represents how collaboration has trumped a tendency towards incrementalism in many cases. IP concerns are primarily handled in open source software—occasional patent and license incompatibility issues notwithstanding.
The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms (Part 1): Value Creation Shifts from Pipes to Platforms
By Vince Kuraitis, JD/MBA, and Randy Williams, MD | November 7, 2022
Value for customers is created differently on platforms than by traditional product/service business models. Today we’ll present and discuss the metaphor of how traditional businesses can be thought of as “pipelines” and how these pipes differ from digital platforms. This post is the first in a new series: “The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms.” We’ll be writing about platform thinking, new mental models, and the new economics of platform business models and strategy. We’ll have at least seven posts to explain these new rules. You’ll have some unlearning to do. We’ll illustrate how platform business models are fundamentally different than traditional product/service business models. To understand platforms, we need to change more than just our thinking—we need to learn new rules about how the digital world works and how platforms fit in.
2022 HL7 Working Group Meeting Continues to Advance a Public Health Agenda
By Daryl Chertcoff | October 7, 2022
The HLN Consulting team attended the HL7 36th Annual Plenary & Working Group Meeting (WGM) held in Baltimore, MD, September 17 – 23, 2022. More than 500 attendees, representing all aspects of the industry, were a part of the WGM in-person meeting after 2 years of virtual meetings. The seven day event started on Saturday with a weekend connectathon. This meeting offered an opportunity for attendees to come together and collaborate. It was a valuable meeting especially for people involved in standards development around healthcare. Read More »
Build An Open Source Project Using This Essential Advice
By Bolaji Ayodeji | September 28, 2022
Open source is a flourishing and beneficial ecosystem that publicly solves problems in communities and industries using software developed through a decentralized model and community contributions. Over the years, this ecosystem has grown in number and strength among hobbyists and professionals alike. It's mainstream now—even proprietary companies use open source to build software. With the ecosystem booming, many developers want to get in and build new open source projects. The question is: How do you achieve that successfully? This article will demystify the lifecycle and structure of open source projects. I want to give you an overview of what goes on inside an open source project and show you how to build a successful and sustainable project based on my personal experience.
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