10 Growth Strategies For A Telehealth Platform

Telehealth Business Model

Telehealth business models can be understood as a typical marketplace model where there are buyers and sellers and the platform acts as a means to connect both. Amazon and Airbnb are great examples of marketplaces.

The best part about marketplaces is the network effect. This means more buyers lead to more sellers, leading to more buyers, and so on; the cycle continues. Once such a system sets in, it becomes hard to compete and it creates a great advantage for a company.

Over time, as sellers build in reputation, profile, trust, safety, and decrease friction, the value is multifolds. In fact, at that point, the platform can be set for automatic growth, and the community itself could become self-managed and keep the growth up. At this time the business achieves growth through scalability, efficiency, and flexibility.

Launching a telehealth platform requires building 2 sides of the platform. On one side, you have to onboard the practitioners and on the other, the customer.

The problem is that neither would like to join the platform before they see the other.

This is the typical marketplace growth problem.

So how to capture this initial growth, we will cover in this blog.

Solving The Marketplace Dilemma- The Chicken and Egg Problem

During the initial phase of a marketplace, there is neither supply nor demand available. The problem is that one side cannot commit without the other. Hence, a marketplace entrepreneur has to find ways to manage the initial growth either through growing one side first or constraining the growth to a level where demand and supply ideally meet before taking it to the next level.

This is a snapshot from Lenny Rechitsky’s blog on Kick Starting and scaling marketplace.

In a snapshot, you can build a better foundation by following one of the strategies

1. Constraint growth – Primarily in offering or geography or both

2. Focus on one side first- Mostly successful companies have focussed on growing supply first.

• Driving early supply- This is because supply could drive its own demand, or word-of-mouth can take care of demand.
• Driving early demand- Here, you have to create value for your users. Find the product-market fit and convince the users to use the platform

In summary, the demand and supply problem is solved by focusing on constraining the market, i.e. either make your business geographically limited to a certain place or make it limited to a certain category of offerings. This gives businesses the time to build its foundation and to ensure growth opportunities.

Further, a marketplace owner should focus on convincing either side of the business before committing to the other, in this way establishing one part of it. Studies have suggested controlling supply growth and then focusing on-demand as a preferred method. Hence after constraining your market first focus on driving the supply in this way ensuring to fulfill vast demand.

5. Make It Available In Low Latency/even Offline Mode

You need to make your content available for the patients over a wide array of channels to ensure connectivity with them. As Telehealth crosses borders and reaches remote areas, have your video stream auto adjust with different internet bandwidth as well as available offline. This is something to be built in during the architecture of the application using adaptive bitrate streaming. Content availability ensures reliability for the platform. Read more about building online-offline architecture here.

One of the popular apps – Doxy, still runs as a web app and does not require the user to download anything.

6. Own The Supply

Like many other marketplaces that have their own products as well to fulfill the marketplace (Remember AmazonBasics), a telehealth entrepreneur too can think of owning the supply by having their own practitioners using the platform. This will help you seed the platform with ample availability of supply right on day one. This is workable for medium size clinics to hospitals where the current model can be changed to on-demand service.
If this is possible for you then you can gradually build the network effect.

7. Check For Availability Of Underutilized Assets To Unlock Growth

Another way to unlock supply would be to think of unconventional ways to find a supply. For telehealth, exploring an international pool of practitioners as well as going international for patients can be a great way for growth. Technology empowers us to go beyond geographical barriers. Telehealth can pave the path for international consultations where say, a patient in UAE could be consulting with an expert in Houston.

Other areas of underutilized assets would be integration with caregivers, lab testing, and physician referral platforms.

8. Check For Changes Around Regulatory Reform

Global conditions and pandemics force regulatory bodies to reform compliances and make them inline with present-day challenges. In fact, there were changes to HIPAA during COVID-19. Such disruptions open up opportunities for innovation. Keep an awareness regarding the changes in compliances and regulations. Sometimes such changes could help you pivot towards a more favorable business opportunity that was not available before.

Here is a video on complying with HIPAA Policies

9. Cover Non-conventional Domains

Get into non-conventional areas of Telehealth like nurse practitioners, veterinary, ambulatory care, caregiver management, or have a hyper-focus on niche areas like teledentistry or telecosmetic, behavioral health, etc. Driving into a hyper niche has been a growth model for many marketplaces. Going niche means you could have a chance to be a leader in that focussed space and drive innovation and competitive advantage.

Going Niche can also be possible on the customer side with a focus on particular ailments, people with special needs, smoking cessation, dermatology needs, etc.

10. Community Based Growth

Another important tool for telehealth platform growth would be building a community as the main aspect of the platform. Through the community, you give people a reason to keep using the platform even when they do not have the transactional need. Also, the community can help you build a loyal customer base as well as advocates for the brand. You can generate a lot of original content as well.

Apps like Mylo and Practo are good examples of community-driven growth