Business Models vs Blockchain Utility
When my partner, Courtney Jones, came to me late Spring 2017 and asked me what I thought would be the best use of blockchain in healthcare, I admitted that I did not know exactly what blockchain was though I had a novice understanding of Bitcoin.
Courtney had been working with cryptocurrency since 2013 when he "forked" Litecoin for special use with charities. He realized that there was an opportunity for donors to be able to not only contribute funds to their favorite charities but also become a deeper part of the community of the charity by receiving crypto tokens representing value in the service allowing the donor to track that value throughout the charity's service cycle.
This was an innovative use case and akin to his innovative nature when he and his buddies created Findwhat.com in the late 90s as the first search engine on the internet to offer pay-per-click searches to advertisers. Findwhat not only made it through the Internet bubble but was the first Internet company on the Nasdaq to post a profit!
This is called creating a business model leveraging the capabilities of the latest in technology. When Courtney asked me that question about healthcare, he was asking me to create a new business model in healthcare that would be able to use the capabilities of the new blockchain technology and provide great benefit to the people before anyone else.
Through the 90s and well into the 20 teens, I had also leveraged the Internet and other technologies to make healthcare a bit more efficient. Until we built into our Universal Healthcoin model community health cost sharing, I can't say my earlier ventures purely created new business models in healthcare, but we did make the legacies processes more efficient. And the people were clamoring for it.
The research I conducted for my doctoral dissertation in health administration basically asked the question to the patients of primary care physicians, "if you could communicate with a doctor online to schedule appointments and have virtual visits with your primary care physician, would you switch doctors from your current personal physician if they would not use the internet to communicate with you to another physician who would?"
The overwhelming results based upon the data I collected in 1999 indicated that enough of the 5,000 people surveyed who would make the switch equated in over $3 billion primary care dollars moving from those who wouldn't to those who would adopt the new internet technology into their practice. Again, that was well before any industry had adopted the internet into their business processes much less healthcare.
This was the writing on the wall I needed to create one of the first web-based physician billing companies helping doctors get paid faster; then to help periodontist place dental implants virtually using the first computer-assisted surgical procedure; and when mobile tech proliferated in the 2010s to use consumer mobile devices to live stream video from a 911 incident directly to first responders to give them early visualization of the situation before they even arrived on the scene.
As I say in my signature tag,
"the tool is always less important than the goal”
I want you to understand is that it is never about the new "fangled" technology that people should be impressed with, it's the businesses that can be created leveraging the new technology and the massive transfer of wealth that occurs when old mindsets wait too long and it moves to those early adopters.
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Learn well, DrJ