![]() ![]() ![]() This has required us to slowly and steadily build up a strong engineering team around this vision over the past 10+ years. VSee has avoided Chiron’s engineering dilemma by always being focused on this third phase of the telehealth adoption cycle: user experience. (Thus, it’s not surprising that clinicians are unhappy with their EMR user experience.) A No Code, Low Code Telehealth Platform Focused on User Experience Note that EMR integration fits into the second wave, where user experience is given lip service, but actual decisions are made by the hospital IT staff, who aren’t using the EMRs in their day-to-day work. It is only in the final third phase that user experience becomes the key concern. In the second phase, the focus is on enterprise deployment where security and making IT happy is key. This is a huge behavior change, and we are still in the first phase for telehealth. For telehealth adoption, the first phase is simply getting patients to make a Zoom call. In the first phase, the technology is so new that the focus is just getting it to work at all. Erika Chuang and I were doing our PhDs at Stanford, we’ve observed that user experience is usually what becomes the deciding factor in the final phase of a technology adoption cycle. Understanding the Telehealth Adoption Cycle This led to the downward cycle of not bringing in enough revenue to track the next level of investment, which led to not being able to hire more engineers, which led to high customer churn. So they lacked the engineers to build out their platform. They did not anticipate the fast growing needs of the telehealth industry for a more comprehensive telehealth platform. This is where Chiron fell into an engineering dilemma. What they would like is a truly comprehensive A to Z telehealth tech stack that can resolve all their solution needs. Typically what ends up happening is clients have to go to multiple vendors to “duct-tape” together a Frankenstein solution that ends up having poor usability and many interactional barriers that contribute to clinician burnout. Anything less than this scale of engineering would only be able to partly solve a client’s problem. Anyone who has tried to scale an enterprise grade telehealth service knows the numerous engineering quagmires and complicated workflow issues involved.īuilding a viable telehealth tech stack that addresses all those complexities requires a massive engineering effort on the scale of fifty to a hundred engineers. Second, telehealth is much more complex than making a Zoom or MS Team call. Thus it is more difficult for telehealth tech stack companies to achieve the revenue they need to be self-sustaining. ![]() However, the actual tech stack providers like Chiron, Doxy, Zoom, VSee get a relatively small share of the overall revenue. were the ones that saw their revenues grow like a hockey stick. Direct-to-consumer telehealth companies like TelaDoc, AmWell, Ro, EverlyWell, One Medical, etc. However, when we look at the overall healthcare value chain, it’s the service providers that take the lion’s share of the revenue. It caused telehealth use to skyrocket and acclimated large swaths of the population to doing video visits. We know that the COVID pandemic pushed the entire telehealth industry forward immensely. Why COVID Telehealth Growth Didn’t Save Chiron We wish the Chiron team all success in their next endeavor. I am sad to hear about the closing of their business.īoth Chiron Health and VSee began as small startups and eventually grew to be frontrunners and competitors in the telehealth arena. While the rest of the industry focused on making video calls, they realized that getting payment – the heart of any successful telemedicine effort – was king. They were one of the first telemedicine software companies with the foresight to offer insurance eligibility and payer reimbursement. I have personally admired Chiron since their founding in 2013. Its founders said that they had hoped to continue via a sale or merger. Chiron was acquired by a competitor Medici in 2019 along with secure healthcare messaging company DocbookMD. The Austin-based telehealth company, which has received $4.7M in funding from a multitude of investors including Plug and Play, Capital Factory, Floodgate, and Martin Ventures. Chiron Health will be shutting down on November 4, 2022. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |