SaaS in healthcare is referring to software as a service specifically for the industry.
Business owners tend to love SAAS because of the recurring revenue month after month or year after year but customers don’t always feel that it’s meaningful to pay for the same service over and over again.
We often see that with marketing tools where the price quickly stacks up as they need to buy a number of tools and they usually charge a monthly fee. It usually happens because there is an essential missing feature in many of the tools that none of the others also carry.
I guess it’s good in the grand scheme of things as it helps us customers make sure we truly need that tool, meaning that they get more customers that really need it compared to casual buyers.
The increased interest in the SAAS business model over the years has been fascinating. It’s high-quality revenue and in some cases that model is chosen even before the business owner has chosen the problem they solve for their customers.
Other business models with payment plans can be turned into SAAS-like revenue with a little creativity such as insurance plans that are paid monthly instead of yearly, or courses with monthly payment plans.
6 Examples of using SAAS in healthcare
SAAS in healthcare is becoming more and more common and are often seen in examples like these:
- CRM tools for relationship management, typically for sales teams
- ERP systems for inventory and order management
- Cyber security solutions
- Systems to manage physician availability against patient booking needs
- It’s wildly popular as marketing automation tools but they usually only solve small problems
- For delivering high quality video telemedicine calls with patients
- Store patient’s medical records
- AI to help doctors read patient X-rays and other medical records to provide more consistent and accurate findings and advice to patients
Those are examples of the kind of SAAS tools I’ve had to buy or work with during my projects in the field.
4 examples of companies that are doing SAAS in our industry
eClinicalWorks
Their system is said to do inventory management, patient bookings, retrieve patients’ medical records and other operational tasks for clinics among other things.
Doctolib
Doctolib offers systems to clinics in France and Germany that help their patients book doctor appointments online or carry out telehealth appointments.
Lyra Health
Lyra Health has built analytics software to help patients and physicians figure out who can benefit from behavioral healthcare.
MedCrypt
They do cyber security specifically for medical devices such as surgical robots or pacemakers.
B2B software is the obvious place to apply SAAS in healthcare but it can also be applied in a B2C manner even if indirectly. In western markets, we’ve seen lots of subscription boxes like Dollar Shave Club but we rarely see it for non-medical products you might buy at the pharmacy such as baby diapers, menstrual pads.
Some businesses leverage the opportunity to help remind patients to take their medicine as part of a longer treatment after being sent home. One particularly cool use case that I haven’t seen done but wish to is a service that combines delivery from services like Uber or Grab with online pharmacies so the patient can get quicker delivery by coordinating with drivers and patient orders.