Box acquires MedXT
blog.box.com
blog.box.com
edit: to clarify, by "this" I mean "stability". One path to build a medical software company has been to start by targeting individual practices, clinics, and small hospitals. That is still possible, and there are plenty of companies doing it. But that path is getting harder to take in the US because of medical industry consolidation. Even "independent" practices now usually have referring affiliations, and more often than not this means that they use the hospital network's existing software infrastructure.
I have no solid idea, but my impression from glancing at solutions for healthcare years ago wasn't that Hospitals are choosing Big Co so much as they have little choice.
As I understand it, smaller companies don't try / give up on keeping up wit the costs of required certifications (possibly the wrong term) and the like.
This also seemed to help explain the slow pace of advances and updates to such systems as patches and changes have their own onerous process.
1. Healthcare is heavily regulated. HIPAA is the most well-known law, but there are also countless local and state laws hospital systems must comply with.
2. Any new software needs to be sufficiently integrated with several existing systems and databases. What this means is that you can't just develop a stand-alone solution that deals with just one part of the process.
3. Many hospital staff are technophobic. Doctors especially.
I'm oversimplifying of course, but this is basically why incumbents (big co) are preferred. They have tons of domain expertise in healthcare, are deeply familiar with processes and requirements AND know plenty of people in the right places to grease the wheels when necessary. This makes it very difficult for startups to break into the industry.
Question: How does Box end up being the largest vendor of collaborative Radiology tech now? Do they already have assets that do similar?
Disclosure, I was chief architect at DICOM Grid and built similar functionality there.
Harder isn't a bad thing. For the last decade in healthcare we've had a small array of large players with strong footholds and really shitty projects, and a huge array of small players with small footholds and really shitty products.
Harder means you have to do a very good job to win, which will probably lower the noise floor among the $NOTBIGCORP crowd and may make that road for growth even more plausible for folks doing something really excellent.
Big companies do mergers all the time (including GE and Siemens selling off and buying business units). Change will always happen.
Congratulations to Reshma and Cody, they've been working extremely hard on producing a very impressive product.
It's well known that anyone a bit into SV and its surroundings is aware of this "meme" and founders are often placing bets whether they will include it in their end-of-product-PR or not.