Strategic Collaborations

Originally Published MX July/August 2003

ADVERTISING, DISTRIBUTION, & SALES

The contraction of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s weeded out the weakest of the Internet healthcare companies and drove the more imaginative and forward-looking to reconstitute themselves, occasionally through mergers and strategic alliances with the surviving trading exchanges.

MedAssets, for example, was founded in April 1999 as an exchange for used capital equipment. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in the industry.

Similarly, Broadlane migrated to the GPO model after its launch in early 2000 by Tenet Healthcare and Ventro, a now-defunct builder of vertical marketplaces, as a venture to sell medical products over the Internet to hospitals and physicians. Broadlane continues to offer a proprietary trading exchange for its customers.

An early technology start-up in 1996, Neoforma today is more closely associated with its GPO majority owner, Novation, and primarily serves hospital members of the large GPO. Its services are, however, available to a broader market.