Can Play-it Health Play Well In Digital Healthcare Field?

We believe that healthcare industry is on the cusp of IT adoption and it's time for us to go all out for it. Thus, we can see that a lot of digital health start-ups spring up in these years, and disappear. Last month, Play-it Health, a digital healthcare application that helps patients keep on track with their medical regimens, founded in 2013, received funding from the 2015 Digital Health Challenge. Apart from that, Play-it Health was also selected to pitch at several big events as well as received two offers for paid pilots in the past month. Obviously, Play-it Health is gaining momentum in this playing field, kindling my interest in it and making me wonder whether it can play the game well and win its future. 

Though the digital healthcare industry is hailed as a promising and profitable market, actually the technology adoption rate in health care is not that high by now. To examine whether a product or service really works in this market, a few question have to be answered. First, what unique health-related problems can it address? Second, who will pay the innovation? And third, can it be adopted at organizational level? 

Play-it Health aims to fill the gap in prescription drug compliance, offering solutions for both patients and doctors to improve medication adherence. It is estimated that the volume of drugs that people consume is about half of the volume that doctors prescribe and the non-adherence causes about 30% to 50% of all treatment failures with millions of deaths and great waste of healthcare budget every year. In this way, Play-it Health does address real problems in health care. However, Play-it Health is, surely, not the only player in this sector.

What the main service that Play-it Health offers is to remind patients of the required timing, dosage and frequency of their medication intake through its mobile application, which is a thing that many companies, like Mango Health, Pillboxie, Medisafe are doing. Actually, in terms of reminder function, Medisafe outperforms Play-it Health by sending alerts to selected families, friends or caretakers of the patient to help them stick to their medical plans. It seems that Play-it Health knows this situation well and thus, channels its effort to develop data analytics, build platform for patients and doctors to communicate with each other, integrate itself with other pharmacy systems as well as to improve the compatibility of its mobile app. Moreover, Play-it Health provides healthcare-related game app to increase patients engagement by helping them know more about their health in an interesting way. 

For patients, according to McKinsey report, the core features they expect are surprisingly mundane: efficiency, information availability, integration with other channels and access to professionals when digital innovations fail to meet their demands. If so, Play-it Health are doing the right things now and should focus on reinforcing these pivotal functions in the near future rather than develop a comprehensive platform with overall offerings. It will be wise to start small and act fast. 

A product or service with good value propositions is not enough in the market where it's all about monetization. Having relationship with major PBMs in U. S. and receiving fundings from investors, Play-it Health reduces the healthcare cost of patients. But the sales process of convincing institutions or private payers is quite complicated and painful which can in further lead to the slowdown of technology update and user base expansion. If Play-it Health can offer solutions which are unique or better enough to tap its users and patients to foot the bills, it will help a lot. 

Undoubtedly, the adoption rate of a new innovation will be accelerated if the company is able to leverage the power of organizations. Play-it Health realizes this key point and tries to do so, partnering with hospitals and seeking for B2B opportunities.  However, it is a big challenge to have doctors embrace new technologies as many doctors think that the data entering and the fixed structure of data entry format slow them down. Apart from that, baby boomer physicians are reluctant to adopt technology in medical care because they see technology and digital data as impersonal. Though Play-it Health has upper hand over other start-ups in the same market in terms of partnership and organizational cooperation, it is merely the starting point for Play-it Health to fight in this playing field which is an immature one. 

Taken unique solutions, payers and organizational system into account, Play-it Health, as a start-up, is on the right track with respect to business model. But the whole industry is tougher than it seems to be due to the fragmented innovations and the slow technology adoption rate. 

How Long Can Google Keep Its Catbird Seat in Online Advertising?

"Sorry, I have no idea but I can do some googling for you." 

As the word "googling" has been taken into dictionary, it is easy to predict the huge market shares of Goggle in web search. Thanks to the powerful search engine and rich database, Google remains undisputed leader in digital advertising field through targeting consumers with the simple but effective text ads. However, in recent years, Facebook has performed quite well in social media advertising, Bing seems to come up as a serious player in search engine battlefield and more alternatives are provided for advertisers in the market. How long can Google keep its catbird seat in online advertising?

It is undeniable that Facebook outperforms Google in display ad category with its strong relevancy and personalization. As is shown by ADI, Facebook's display click-through rates (CTRs) is up 35%, 10% higher than that of Google. It is demonstrated that Facebook's display ads are more relevant than Google's and thus surely it will attract more marketers and advertisers. 

Now, Facebook is testing new ad forms, allowing Facebook users to see the details of products on Facebook pages rather than direct them to the websites of the companies. In this way, Facebook attempts to keep users stay on the page by helping them get rid of the slow-loading sites. 

According to Morgan Stanley, from 2012 to 2014, the share of display online advertising kept growing while the search marketing, the edge of Google, was shrinking. And it is projected that the U.S. digital display ad market share of Facebook will rise by 3.1% from 23.8% to 26.9%, while the share of Google will dip 2.6%, from 13.7% to 11.1%.

As a new entrant, compared to Google, to digital display ad market, Facebook is likely to eat away more Google's slice of market share.

Since Google AdWords is no longer a cost-effective tool for small businesses or startups as it used to be in the beginning, small businesses have to drop a lot to drive traffic. Due to the low return on investment (ROI), small businesses or startups are turning to other lower costing solutions, like Bing Ads. 

Based on eMarketer, it is shown that Being outperformed Google in terms of the paid search spend growth in regions around the world except North America. Plus, on the basis of statistics from StatCounter, Google's search share is shrinking in these years and fell below 75% in U.S. for the first time in January. While its competitors, like Bing and Yahoo have been witnessed a trend of growth, reaching 12.4% and 10.9% respectively by January 2015. 

Faced with the growing bargaining power of substitutes, Google expects to return to China market in this fall following a five-year absence. Besides the large scale of 6490 million Internet users in China, the support of national policy in Internet industry which helps boost the digital economy in China, also attracts Google to re-enter the market. However, it is difficult to say whether its strategy will work or not in Chinese ecosystem, which is a complicated and closed one.

Apart from going  for display advertising and search engine marketing (SEO), marketers can also do search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing or email marketing by themselves. As increasingly more choices are provided for advertisers and marketers, the charm of Google may encounter a drop. 

According to eMarketer, the worldwide digital ad market shares of Google just increased 0.2% from 2012 to 2014. Meanwhile, Facebook along with Twitter and other smaller players are eating away Google's slice of digital ad revenues in display advertising. It is projected that Google's total digital ad market shares will shrink from 41.6% to 35.4% in U.S. market. 

Admittedly, Google still remains in the catbird seat in online advertising, but faced with the growing bargaining power of new entrants, substitutes and buyers, Google is under pressure now. Can it bring us another impressive innovative as it used to do with AdWords or come up with any strategy to keep the throne?  Let's wait and see.