The World is Fat...and Well Cared For
The recent IPO of Baltimore-based Visicu was the first significant healthcare IT related IPO in the last few months, and public appetite for the offering was strong, with first day prices rising almost 25%.
Visicu offers remote monitoring capabilities to hospital Intensive Care Units (ICUs) by providing software that streams video, audio and data feeds for specific patients to remote intensivists or cirtical care nurses who can monitor patients for adverse events. The company’s Smart Alert system can also monitor for changes that, based on the company’s proprietary decision support rules, can trigger alerts based on certain changes of condition. Using the system, one intensivist and two ICU nurses making virtual rounds can effectively monitor up to 100 ICU patients, almost a 10x increase over what the same group can do on their own.
While an encouraging sign of life in the Healthcare IT market that has publicly been fairly stagnant since the days of WebMD, Visicu’s success and appeal is more driven by the lack of certified healthcare resources in the U.S. than by some untapped new frontier in e-health. According to the company’s S-1, there are approximately 6,000 board certified intensivists in the United States, an estimated one-quarter of the number needed to cover all ICU beds in the country. Visicu’s solution is appealing because it allows for scale in a previously unscalable activity, lowers costs, increases bed turnover, and, most importantly, saves lives. According to the company, use of their systems can reduce mortality rates by up to 30%, a percentage that translates into 54,000 lives annually. While former starts-ups like Google and others have undoubtedly had an impact on how we live, even on their best day, there are few technology companies that can lay claim as to whether we live.
On the flip side of this karmic technology tale is Bronco Communications a California-based call center technology solutions provider that has gotten some ink lately as the result of their roll-out of a beta program with local area McDonalds to move drive-thru order taking out of McDonalds and into their 50 seat call center facility. Since going live in January, Bronco has used their VOIP-based system to take over 150,000 orders, charging McDonalds .28 cents per transaction.
Much like Visicu, Bronco provides scalability in a process that previously lacked scalability. During peak hours, each Bronco agent can take up to 95 orders; a significant increase over manual levels. Additionally, like Visicu, Bronco touts the benefits of increased customer satisfaction and corporate compliance as their agents properly greet customers and more effectively manage corporate process and procedure, ie, letting patron’s know that they must ask for condiments, rather than assuming. Unlike Visicu, though, the market opportunity that Bronco is trying to carve out is not the result of limited resources. Bronco’s agent profile is that of a typical call center employee—minimum wage, no health benefits, and abundant supply.
Regardless of the profile and level of training required by the human’s being scaled by Bronco and Visicu respectively, both companies represent business models facilitated by the ability to transmit large amounts of data over the Web with a high degree of reliability. In Visicu’s case, it is literally a matter of life and death, whereas in the case of Bronco, it may just be a matter of extreme obesity. Both instances, though, are noteworthy realizations of the Flat World as coined by Tom Friedman where human resources can use technology to do things more efficiently than previously imaginable in places we never thought they would.
Visicu offers remote monitoring capabilities to hospital Intensive Care Units (ICUs) by providing software that streams video, audio and data feeds for specific patients to remote intensivists or cirtical care nurses who can monitor patients for adverse events. The company’s Smart Alert system can also monitor for changes that, based on the company’s proprietary decision support rules, can trigger alerts based on certain changes of condition. Using the system, one intensivist and two ICU nurses making virtual rounds can effectively monitor up to 100 ICU patients, almost a 10x increase over what the same group can do on their own.
While an encouraging sign of life in the Healthcare IT market that has publicly been fairly stagnant since the days of WebMD, Visicu’s success and appeal is more driven by the lack of certified healthcare resources in the U.S. than by some untapped new frontier in e-health. According to the company’s S-1, there are approximately 6,000 board certified intensivists in the United States, an estimated one-quarter of the number needed to cover all ICU beds in the country. Visicu’s solution is appealing because it allows for scale in a previously unscalable activity, lowers costs, increases bed turnover, and, most importantly, saves lives. According to the company, use of their systems can reduce mortality rates by up to 30%, a percentage that translates into 54,000 lives annually. While former starts-ups like Google and others have undoubtedly had an impact on how we live, even on their best day, there are few technology companies that can lay claim as to whether we live.
On the flip side of this karmic technology tale is Bronco Communications a California-based call center technology solutions provider that has gotten some ink lately as the result of their roll-out of a beta program with local area McDonalds to move drive-thru order taking out of McDonalds and into their 50 seat call center facility. Since going live in January, Bronco has used their VOIP-based system to take over 150,000 orders, charging McDonalds .28 cents per transaction.
Much like Visicu, Bronco provides scalability in a process that previously lacked scalability. During peak hours, each Bronco agent can take up to 95 orders; a significant increase over manual levels. Additionally, like Visicu, Bronco touts the benefits of increased customer satisfaction and corporate compliance as their agents properly greet customers and more effectively manage corporate process and procedure, ie, letting patron’s know that they must ask for condiments, rather than assuming. Unlike Visicu, though, the market opportunity that Bronco is trying to carve out is not the result of limited resources. Bronco’s agent profile is that of a typical call center employee—minimum wage, no health benefits, and abundant supply.
Regardless of the profile and level of training required by the human’s being scaled by Bronco and Visicu respectively, both companies represent business models facilitated by the ability to transmit large amounts of data over the Web with a high degree of reliability. In Visicu’s case, it is literally a matter of life and death, whereas in the case of Bronco, it may just be a matter of extreme obesity. Both instances, though, are noteworthy realizations of the Flat World as coined by Tom Friedman where human resources can use technology to do things more efficiently than previously imaginable in places we never thought they would.
posted by Jesse Lawrence at 7:39 PM
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