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.