One of the biggest concerns of mobile healthcare entrepreneurs and investors is the business model. Although there is a lot of money in the healthcare industry, because of the complexity of the system, the business model may not be obvious. Many products "look beautiful", but I'm afraid they just make a lot of money, not a lot of money. The business model involves the question of what value to create for whom and how to charge for it. In China, there is no mature business model for mHealth.
Foreign mobile medical business model
1, Epocrates - to the drug companies charge
Epocrates is the world's first listed mobile medical company, in January this year to nearly 300 million U.S. dollars to be acquired. Epocrates for doctors to provide cell phone on the reference of clinical information, and its main products are drugs and clinical treatment database. At the time of its launch in 2010, the company's users covered 40 percent of all doctors in the U.S. Epocrates generated about $120 million in revenue in 2012, 75 percent of which came from drug companies, for which it mainly provides accurate advertising and questionnaire services.
2. Zocdoc-charging doctors
Zocdoc recommends doctors for patients based on geographic location, insurance status, and doctor specialization, and appointments can be completed directly on the platform. The company, founded in 2007, has raised close to $100 million in total funding. Zocdoc has a business model that is free for patients and charges doctors. Patients can choose and book appointments with doctors more easily, and doctors may get more patients, especially those covered by insurance, meaning more revenue. Each month doctors pay $250 to use the Zocdoc platform. Based on the number of doctors Zocdoc publishes, its annual revenue should be in the tens of millions of dollars.
In the future, Zocdoc will have more models for charging health insurers. Insurers want patients to see "cost-effective" doctors, and Zocdoc's recommendations could influence patients' choices and reduce costs for insurers.
3. Vocera - charging hospitals
Vocera provides mobile communication solutions for hospitals, and its core product is a mobile device that doctors and nurses can wear around their necks or pin to their chests to send and receive messages, make calls, and set up reminders anytime, anywhere, replacing the beepers that were previously used in hospitals. In the U.S., patient information security requirements are very high, and there is a special HIPPA Act regulating the use and transmission of information. While general mobile devices are not allowed to transmit patient-related information (e.g., doctors cannot use personal email to send patient information), Vocera's devices are HIPPA-compliant and are ideal for team use; Vocera has more than 300 hospital customers in the U.S., with annual revenues of close to $100 million. The company also went public in 2012 with a market capitalization of more than $600 million.
4. WellDoc-charging insurance companies
WellDoc is a mobile technology company focusing on chronic disease management, and its main product is a cell phone + cloud-based diabetes management platform. Patients can conveniently record and store blood glucose data using their cell phones. Algorithms in the cloud are able to provide patients with personalized feedback based on blood glucose data, alerting doctors and nurses in a timely manner. The system has been approved by the FDA as a medical device, and has been reimbursed by two health insurance companies for providing it to insured diabetic patients because it has demonstrated its clinical effectiveness and economic value in clinical studies.Welldoc has even partnered with pharmaceutical companies to sell the service to doctors using their pharmaceutical ghostwriters.
5. Zeo - charging consumers
A large class of consumer-oriented health mobile apps monitor heart rate, diet, exercise, sleep and other physiological parameters through a wearable piece of hardware. The current business model is based on selling hardware to consumers. One example is ZEO, a company that provides mobile sleep monitoring and personalized sleep coaching. Its product, ZEO, is a wristband and headband that connects via Bluetooth to a cell phone or a bedside device to record nightly sleep cycles and provide a quality score. Users can get a quantitative understanding of their sleep by monitoring changes in the score or comparing it to the average for their age group. In addition, for those who do not sleep well, ZEO also provides personalized sleep guidance, with some tests to find possible problems.ZEO's products are available in many department stores in the U.S. for $149 for a set. Follow-on revenue also includes commissions on personalized recommendations for products and medications.
The wearables market is seen by businessmen as a new blue ocean, with commercial companies large and small showing keen interest in it.
Google, Apple, Nike, Samsung, Microsoft, Baidu, Sony and others have launched several products. The industry's more consistent view is that the wearable devices will have the most development potential in areas such as health care, fitness, industrial applications, optics, and fashion and creativity.
U.S. wearable medical profit model
CardioNet opened a new model of wearable medical profit
CardioNet is a U.S. Nasdaq-listed company, and its main product is the MCOT (MobileCardiacOutpatientTelemetry) is able to record the 30 days of the MCOT (MobileCardiacOutpatientTelemetry) records a patient's ECG data over a 30-day period and transmits the data over the Internet to the company's monitoring center, where the data is analyzed and diagnosed by a back-end system that sends reports to the patient.
U.S. mHealth Profit Models
Paid Apps: Eprocrates, WellDocEpocrates, an app used by almost every doctor, charges doctors. Provides information on thousands of prescription drugs and hundreds of over-the-counter drugs, as well as other features such as a medical calculator. Enhanced versions start at $99 per year. The $199 per year hardcover deluxe version of Epocrates offers evidence-based information processing, treatment guidelines, lab preparation and interpretation, a medical dictionary, and ICD-9 and CPT codes. Typically you start with a search for, say, skin conditions, melanoma, and then you can see pictures, get information about the cause and related conditions, and then you can go deeper to get more information about those conditions. It also provides guidance on what information to look for given a medical history, what tests to run and what treatments to choose for each body type.
Possible Business Models for Healthy Wearables
Future health wearables could have a combination of the following business models, but most likely hardware will be sold at or below cost, with profit made through software and service sales.
●Hardware sales
●Derivative service sales based on the collection of users' exercise, sleep and diet data
●Service and software sales
China's mHealth business model is taking shape
China's mHealth business model exploration process has also given birth to a number of business model prototypes. For example, four-dimensional technology "and community hospitals and clinics *** birth" business model, the new element of health care "health hut + membership services" business model, Zhongwei Laikang "from the hospital, and insurance and telecommunications cooperation, adhere to do service provider" business model, and "remote monitoring service for hospital customers" of Youjali. In the future, China's wearable mobile medical device business model is most likely to be at cost or below cost price for hardware sales, but through software, later operation services to profit.