A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 7)

Sramana: It does not sound like you are running a typical exchange or marketplace. The industry definition of an exchange or market place involves new business procurement or referral. Places like eBay are considered marketplaces. I don’t see that happening with your network.

Bruce Johnson: Where healthcare is concerned there is a lot of additional infrastructure that has to be put in place. We have not gotten to that point yet.

Sramana: Are there compliance related issues that you have to tackle in this exchange such as FDA or HIPAA?

Bruce Johnson: Yes. From a compliance perspective we are building new tools that will help with HIPAA. As you start to automate some of the products that have serial and lot numbers associated with a patient and what was implanted then it becomes important to encrypt that information and handle it from a HIPAA perspective. We certainly have data concerns. We have to ensure that we are keeping everybody’s data separate and we handle that from an audit and data security perspective.

Sramana: What about social collaboration? In this network is there a lot of business communication and collaboration happening on your platform?

Bruce Johnson: Yes, we have some new tools that allow the buyers and sellers to get connected on their own. There are a couple of tools that they would leverage. One is a registration tool that is allowing them to set up new connections. The other is this new product that would help synchronize the contract price they have agreed to. For example a hospital would list the facilities that are eligible for a particular contract. That would get synchronized in our system with what the manufacturer and distributor have in their database.

Sramana: It sounds like you have a very unique platform.

Bruce Johnson: What makes our situation unique is the community of users. That allows us to be very innovative in coming up with solutions. We can go after problems that you cannot solve as an individual hospital or as an individual supplier. We are leveraging the latest technology for that community to solve those types of problems.

Sramana: Where is GHX based out of?

Bruce Johnson: We are based out of Louisville, Colorado.

Sramana: How many people do you have in the company?

Bruce Johnson: There are 600 of us globally.

Sramana: Thank you for taking the time to share your story. Congratulations on your success to date.

This segment is part 7 in the series : A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX
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