Too often in healthcare, people are out shopping for products before their organization has aligned around a defined need. At least that's what Bruce Brandes thinks. It's also what his startup, Lucro, aims to change.
"What Lucro wants to do is allow users to focus first on the challenge or opportunity they seek to address," he says as Founder and CEO. "We want to turn the tables around and prioritize the problem first, then invest time to discover specific products that will solve and address it. Lucro is a place of opportunity, a place to privately discover, organize and collaborate to help users make the most efficient and effective decisions."
Backed by Martin Ventures, HCA Insight Capital and Heritage Group, Lucro is an online marketplace that reinvents how buyers and sellers of innovative healthcare solutions connect. It works a bit like Pinterest combined with other familiar applications. Healthcare leaders can identify, compare, collaborate and evaluate different solutions with a community of industry peers, "pinning" solutions they think would best fit their organization's needs. Solution providers can raise their visibility to connect to healthcare leaders with relevant products and services to fulfill buyers' needs. The online marketplace, funded through investors, can be accessed by healthcare leaders and vendors at no cost. Premium services are available for a cost.
Since its launch in November 2015, Lucro's mission to rethink the healthcare solutions marketplace remains unchanged. However, Lucro is looking ahead with refined clarity. In a recent executive summary, Mr. Brandes reflected on Lucro's first months and the company's intention to listen to industry leaders. Mr. Brandes spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about the executive summary and Lucro's path forward.
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How have Lucro's initial goals guided the company throughout the past year? Have any of those goals changed?
Bruce Brandes: We officially launched in November 2015, after working on the company throughout 2015. Since our launch, Lucro's high-level goal and mission has not changed. We want healthcare to accelerate innovation, and we want to reinvent how buyers and sellers in the healthcare industry connect.
However, our clarity regarding how to go about this has sharpened. We built a multi-sided platform after learning from other platforms that reinvent how people shop, like Airbnb and e-Harmony, and gained greater clarity to how these platforms can apply to healthcare. By working with leading health systems throughout the country — such as Nashville, Tenn.-based Hospital Corporation of America, Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems, Brentwood-based Lifepoint Health, Texas Health Resources in Arlington, Dignity Health in San Francisco, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, St. Luke's University Health Network in Bethlehem, Penn., among others — we are understanding how limited time is. Leaders from these organizations informed us the time it takes to discover, decide and purchase the tools is about 18 months. But we don't have 18 months anymore. We need take action now.
So while our mission is the same, we've gained greater clarity and are disclosing how this works through idea boards, solution boards and a smart algorithm that makes better use of all of our collaborators' energies. Of all the areas of innovation in healthcare, we have focused initially on healthcare IT, to provide clarity to common areas of priority such as population health, patient engagement, telehealth, value-based care, interoperability, care coordination and more.
Q: What are idea boards, and how do interested healthcare leaders create and interact with them?
BB: When we launched in November, we engaged the Silicon Valley tech design firm that built multi-sided platforms like Airbnb, Nike+ and eHarmony. They knew little about healthcare. So we had them collaborate with two dozen innovators in healthcare who knew little about tech. As the two began to understand the others' challenges, Lucro began to understand the use of idea boards.
Idea boards provide a better way for individuals and groups to organize thinking and simplify collaboration, minimizing in-person meetings, emails, spreadsheets and PowerPoints. They evolve through three stages as an idea progresses.
The first stage starts when an individual, like a chief innovation officer, wants to tackle a specific problem. That individual creates an idea board outlining what he or she wants to accomplish, and can pin products and services the individual thinks may work well for his or her specific problem. Collaboration can be bolstered by inviting specific colleagues to privately participate on that idea board.
In the second stage, once the idea is more fully baked, the idea board can be published internally across their hospital or health system, driving awareness to coordinate and align potentially disparate efforts within the same organization, or to drive understanding of already defined corporate standards. In the last stage, to ensure decision-makers are aware of all the latest and best potential solutions to that problem, the idea board can be published, anonymously, to the entire Lucro marketplace. This allows vendors to give all the idea boards a look (without identifying the health system) and suggest specific solutions to the problem for efficient, private consideration.
Q: Can you talk about the algorithm Lucro uses?
BB: Our algorithm plays matchmaker for buyers and sellers. The algorithm gets basic objectives regarding the problem an organization is trying to solve and the concise facts about a particular product. Lucro gains an understanding of the buyers' profiles and can learn from what similar organizations have evaluated. Vendors can "knock" to the owners of idea boards, and these owners can privately consider the vendor's solution cards, get basic facts and respond if they are interested or not. In essence, it works like eHarmony to make more applicable connections.
This acts as a much more qualified opportunity for consideration, as the conversation is not a cold call. A vendor is specifically reaching out to solve the healthcare organization's problem. It's an effective use of time, and it's efficient. The more clear and specific the vendors are, the more likely they are to find a possible match. To claim "we are a synergistic partner" doesn't mean anything, but "we can reduce cardiac readmissions by 20 percent" does. And as we move forward, the power of the community and the value for everyone will only grow with more and more users.
Q: How do healthcare leaders, innovators and organizations get involved?
BB: Healthcare organizations can join by invitation. The system is far enough along now that we have the clarity to selectively invite health systems to Lucro. As the right people begin with us now and once we invite the next wave of systems, ultimately the content will be robust enough to make it available nationally in the coming months and globally after that. We currently have a couple international health systems on our waiting list.
Q: What trends do you see affecting the healthcare in the future, and how will Lucro adapt?
BB: The industry is certainly not lacking opinions regarding a rapidly-expanding market of offerings from both new and established vendors. So much “noise” leads to confusion and perceived risk that delays decision making. We believe Lucro is uniquely positioned to synthesize and provide context to the array of third party data points. Trusted sources of insight, such as certain industry associations, GPOs, consulting firms and industry analysts are potentially strategic partners to align with Lucro in this effort.
Q: How has your philosophy adapted throughout Lucro's first months?
BB: Philosophically, we know what we know and what we can be good at. But we are also aware we can't do this alone. We have been trying to be as inclusive as possible to align with other industry thought leaders. We want to collaborate with trusted, established organizations, as well as new innovators across of the industry.
Q: Where do you envision Lucro in a year from now? Five years from now?
BB: A year from now, Lucro should become a standard. That is, anyone in healthcare seeking innovative healthcare IT solutions to solve a problem will look to Lucro first.
Further out, I think about all the data we gather as a byproduct of how the platform is used. We capture every idea, search, pin, rating, etc. Without ever compromising information specific to an individual or organization, the meta-data can provide invaluable industry and market insight that frankly doesn't exist in healthcare right now. This type of education of the market, on both the buyer and seller side, can be transformational.
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