[dariosalvi78]

Thank you for this, so much needed. I hope that you are going to come to Europe soon.

Honest question, how was your experience with getting funding on an open source product within healthcare? My experience so far is that the field is, as you put it, 30 years back, also in terms of business models.

[dgoncharov]

Europe is its own beast of healthcare data problems for sure - perhaps one day.

We get asked the fundraising question a lot, especially since we're open source. Once investors understood that we still have a hosted product we charge for, and that we have a large moat since someone could fork our code but it'd be very difficult to run the business (compliance, getting access to the different networks, understanding the niche space, etc) - open source wasn't a hinderance to raising.

One thing we learned though, is that even though every human interacts with the healthcare system in some capacity - very few people know how things actually work. So, we had to tailor our pitches to make investors understand why our product matters, since generally even people that have healthcare experience, have no idea what the hell an HIE is.

That, and our GTM allowed us to sell quickly, without needing to wait for slow moving hospital contracts, as are typical in healthcare - so some decent traction definitely helped.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I suspect that having a hosted solution -one that is very secure, could be quite lucrative.

This, on its own, is probably not something that folks could just throw onto any server, and expect reputable heath providers to use (at least, I hope not). Auditing and validation ain't cheap.

I applaud the idea, and hope that it works out. Most health providers still require faxes, which is a huge pain in the butt.

I have also heard many complaints about Epic Systems.

[dgoncharov]

> one that is very secure

Another reason we're open source - better security.

> Most health providers still require faxes, which is a huge pain in the butt.

Yes indeed - mindblowing how such critical data still relies on faxes in 2024.

> I have also heard many complaints about Epic Systems.

Yeah, Epic is not perfect, but they are ubiquitous in healthcare - and Metriport provides a nice interface to pull/push data to their EHRs!

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I wish you great luck. I sincerely hope it works out.

> Epic is not perfect

They have managed to do great consolidation, but the people that I hear complaints from, are the end-users (doctors, nurses, and first-line medical admins). They are a tough crowd to please (most of the medical folks I know personally, are technophobes), but I have seen some of the Epic interfaces, and they could use improvement; even for a techie, like me.

It appears as if Epic is pretty good at marketing to decision-makers (high-level administrators), and maybe have been a bit less diligent on UX design. Good money-making policy, but it also means that an open API opens the field to competitors that do a better job of serving end-users. That could give Epic a reason to throw up roadblocks. Incumbents don't like upstarts.

[dariosalvi78]

it's a case where the payer is different from the user. Payer wants to tick boxes, user wants to be efficient. I see this in education for example, where platforms like Canvas are ubiquitous (not implying that Canvas is not usable, they do a good job IMHO, but it must be like hell for them!).