Business Model Innovation

A medical device, diagnostic, digital health product, care-delivery innovation, clinical workflow or healthcare service rarely moves from inventor to patient directly. It passes through physicians, hospitals, health systems, distributors, DME suppliers, pharmacies, specialty pharmacies, PBMs, payers, employers, purchasing organizations, government programs, home-health organizations, laboratories and benefit managers.

This area studies how healthcare innovations actually reach patients and where the economic value ends up. It is not about choosing between subscription pricing, licensing and product sales. It is about the structure underneath that choice.

Who must approve it, prescribe it, purchase it, distribute it, implement it, get paid for it, assume risk for it, and benefit economically from its use?

In healthcare these are usually different parties. The physician who orders it spends none of the money. The supplier who bills for it did not build it. The employer or risk-bearing organization that gains when it works often never sees the sales conversation. Understanding who occupies each of those positions is the work.

For each intermediary in a chain there are seven postures available: retain it, bypass it, replace it, consolidate it with others, automate its work, partner with it, or become it. Which posture is correct depends on whether the intermediary's function is legally and clinically required or merely historical, and on where the margin and the risk sit.

That is the standing claim of this area: intermediation is a design variable, not an unavoidable feature of healthcare. Research here produces mapped value chains, business-model hypotheses and individual opportunity studies in a consistent format, so that different opportunities can be compared and revisited as facts change.