Hacker News Reader

Comment by flatfilefan | Hacker News Reader

Did you try to connect with your prospective customers via LinkedIn? What do they say to you?

The issue is these prospective clients are generally hospitals using an existing EMR system. And when they need some custom solution then they tend to connect to their provider instead of giving us the deal.

Well, what about the decision makers in those hospitals? Do they have accounts on LinkedIn? If they don’t, where could you meet them, maybe some industry fairs or conferences?

We attend conferences such as FHIR DevDays which is more about the technical aspects and attended by less prospective clients and more market competitors. The decision makers in hospitals are hard to contact. But you are right, probably some conference/fair might be there with better target audience.

Even if people don't have particularly accessible LinkedIn profiles, if you know their names it's often possible to guess or construct an email address for them based on the format of other publicly available emails for the same institution.

There are also tools like https://hunter.io/ and https://rocketreach.co/ which attempt to automate the process for you. I've had very mixed results with those kinds of tools, but they're worth knowing about.

IMO hospitals are your worst target. They have seven figure deployments, maybe eight, and they have an army of HIT techs. THey also have a vendor relationship you cannot break.

However... hospitals have partners, contractors, vendors, processors. In your shoes I would be looking at people who want to interop with hospitals.

Some ideas:

- State Medicaid agencies. Generally do not have the tech staff, but they do have money and contracts, and much of it is set-aside for small business.

- Anyone with an NQIIC contract. All tasked with reducing provider burden and imprving care transitions. FHIR to the rescue. https://www.g2xchange.com/statics/cms-awards-25b-network-of-...

- Case in point. I need a legacy data dictionary transposed to FHIR elements so that instead of manual record abstraction I can ship an HL7-ready spec for data abstraction.

- Case reporting. There are FHIR-aware case reporting frameworks, no-one knows how to use them. There's a global pandemic on at the moment, so lots of case reporting is needed. Public health agencies exist in just about every county and city in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com