] I thought making a play in the healthcare industry would be a cakewalk. I was wrong. Stupidly, ignorantly wrong.
] in healthcare, many great ideas falter because of technology — or more specifically, the difficulty in integrating to legacy systems. During 2009 to 2012, many great ideas for healthcare companies received seed funding between $500,000 to $2 million. While this was enough to get a proof of concept or even a working beta with some painfully long sales cycle pilot customers, it often wasn’t enough to overcome the political and technical hurdles of integrating into myriad legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, Practice Management systems, billing software, etc.
] I still vividly remember the excitement — later turned into disillusionment — of landing our first respectable research hospital who loved our software, but needed it to integrate into their multi-million-dollar EHR system. The EHR company actually sent a “diplomat” to my office to get an idea of our feature set, then told us that integrations are a long and carefully thought-out process “because of HIPAA.” They then went to the hospital and convinced them that integrating would cost several million dollars, and that it was largely unnecessary, as they were planning on building those same features anyway. What a coincidence.