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by akrasia
4666 days ago
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Your advice is duly noted. I am planning to talk to the director of the pulmonary team sometime this week and see if he is interested. I know most of the doctors who work in the lab will welcome the software. Seeing that most large hospitals pay 50+ million for their EHR/EMR setup, $500/month sounds reasonable. I looked briefly into building it myself (just in case this thread did not get a good response), and I can parse out the text using the pdf-reader gem and now I just need to use some regex to match what I want and then stick those values into a report. Thanks again for the advice. |
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When I worked for a construction project management startup, this too sounded reasonable: many software systems for this audience were in the six-figure range... we were only asking $100/month or so. ("And a free trial!!!")
We learned that when your monthly price point is the size of an accounting error, no one can take you seriously.
This software was also holistic in nature: everyone, everyone, everyone has to use it for it to work well and as a core part of their organization. It's a superset of the marketplace business problem.
To address these we had to charge more. Much more. This raised the stakes on both parties and also filtered out less serious buyers who would probably fail with our software.
The construction companies who were serious buyers really considered thoroughly whether they could implement the change; we worked with them for, sometimes, months going through how the change would take place. And training, training, training. Usage metrics. Account hand-holders. Keep them using the system.
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As others have said, medical software is some of the hardest to break into. Medical staff HATE CHANGE, and need to. Change in the short term leads to mistakes and mistakes cost lives or careers. The system is bureaucratic, politicized and slow moving. Anti-disruption.
I believe that a guerrilla approach to insurgent medical software is ultimately what will work - things like https://www.radiologyprotocols.com/, where a radiology tech wanted a common repository of knowledge for others in his field. Then, through word of mouth and using it with his colleagues, it gained first use in his hospital, then international use, and now it's starting to take off in the US. (Reminds me of "Big in Japan" first, or conversely Japanese artists having to become popular in the US before being taken seriously back in Japan.)
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Okay, advice.
Sell it before you make it. If you have multiple hospital/medical contacts, play with pricing. Try outrageous things. If not, just try to work out any sort of deal and have them sign a piece of paper that says they'll pay.
Then build it.
Iterate with the first customer until it's "So Good They Can't Ignore You".
After this, you might get better traction outside the US. There are hospitals in other countries who are desperate for good software and also don't have the money for the large EMR software many US hospitals use.
GOOD LUCK!