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Comment by mwilcox | Hacker News Reader

He should obviously be selling to clinics / hospitals

Plus when did the 'we don't have any budget' excuse stop a SaaS company? That's what you raise VC for - build the product, hand it to the customer for 'free' and charge them what it was really worth based on their usage when you threaten to take it away

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Or try insurance actuaries. If _better outcomes_ is the goal then doctors will want to keep their premiums low by prescribing the optimal drug. If the actuaries are able to see what the doctors are prescribing and what is the better fit they might be able to increase premiums for doctors that take more risks prescribing off of the meta-analysis.

Exactly! Find the people that benefit from healthier patients, that'd be insurers or HMOs like Kaiser Permanente.

Edit: Or even Medicaire?

Or, pharma. They have pockets and imagine what that graphic could be worth to Aleve. Otherwise reps could use this data in their sales pitches. Lots of money here.

Have that doctor introduce you to her pharma reps.

Find other data that is specialty specific and sell to pharma in that specialty.

I’m a healthcare CFO and this could work. You’re talking to people that’s a great step.

Keep talking. You built the thing, put it on a $30/month server. I suspect you don’t need the cloud stuff. Just make it your proprietary graphics & viz data. It doesn’t have to be freely available.

Raise money for this. You’re in the Bay Area for a reason.

Get commitments from pharma first. Keep more of your company from PE.

Good luck.

Or he should try selling it to CVS as a in-the-store tool for OTC products, where his original need came from in the first place.

Interesting, could be a differentiator from other pharmacies.

CVS doesn't care if you buy Tylenol or Advil or which one works better, and makes no additional money depending on your choice of product. In fact, the brands pay CVS for the privilege of being featured on an eye-level shelf vs at the bottom.

I think it was a great article. Like it said: To succeed, an offering must create value for all entities involved in the exchange—target customers, the company, and its collaborators. And value is literally measured in dollars, so you're either saving or making money for someone, otherwise it's just a fun project.

I would absolutely choose one store over another if they had a proprietary tool to tell me which medicine is scientifically most likely to work for my ailment. I cannot stand the massive wall of choices at pharmacies.

This is a pretty short-sighted way of thinking of it.

A tool like this could easily be marketed as a USP for a pharmacy:

"Only CVS has MedFinder: a proprietary system to find you the medication that's most likely to help cure YOUR SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS. No more standing in front of the racks of too-similar sounding medications. Enter your symptoms, get a recommendation backed with data!"

The product here is a kiosk backed with some real data that you can build a marketing effort around as yet another way to try to differentiate yourself in a heavily commoditized business. Pharmacies fight tooth and nail to get people in their door, and especially, to transfer prescriptions to them. One more small detail that you can convince people might help them, that actually gets them through the door? You could build an entire campaign around it.

(Think Dr. Scholls placing those foot-pressure-sensor systems in pharmacies. They drive, pun intended, foot traffic.)

Is it possible to sell to single payer health providers in other countries? Something like this could have massive implications for, say, the UK's NHS.

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