"I Guess We're A Services Company"

Have a greater control over the consistency of service quality for your end customer. This builds trust with them, which is important.

I feel like tech-land forgets that you can build really big services businesses.

Have customers outsource functions to you that they don’t have expertise in-house. You can take a much larger and stickier contract if they outsource departments or personnel to you, and you get the operational benefit of having those experts work across multiple customers.

More easily guide your customers to new, potentially higher margin products that you’re expanding into that might be relevant for them. Most customers don’t want to deal with a million different solutions that don’t talk to each other, they want a single service that can fulfill whatever the job to be done is.

Livongo and One Medical are good examples of this. They’ve built businesses that sell their services, and use tech to do it deliver it more efficiently and with a better experience for the end patient.

Accrue the efficiencies that tech can bring. If you’re just selling a tool then eventually you’ll handoff to the legacy healthcare system and most of those efficiencies will vanish. If you build a tech-enabled service from the ground up, you can build workflows for the services component that actually take advantage of the tech.

Do you NEED to be a services company to be successful in healthcare? No. But having a services component lets you do the following things: