Special Interest Media@thoughtson_tech
Watched a hospital system spend $4 million and eighteen months building a prior auth workflow tool that their vendor could have sold them for a fraction of that. At the time, that build cost was the vendor's best sales argument. "You'll never replicate this internally." They were right, until now.
That shift from precious to abundant hits healthcare harder than most sectors, because so much of health tech's valuation was built on exactly that scarcity. The moat wasn't proprietary data or clinical expertise or FDA clearance. It was just that software was expensive and time-consuming to build, so once a vendor was in, the rebuild cost kept them there. That logic is collapsing fast, and the companies most exposed are the ones whose entire value proposition was "we encoded your business rules into software before you could afford to do it yourself."
What doesn't commoditize is what software was always wrapping around: longitudinal patient data, payer contracts, regulatory certifications, and the clinical relationships that make any of it actually usable in practice. Software being free changes everything about the build-versus-buy calculus for large health systems and payers, and almost nothing about what actually makes a healthcare company defensible once the build cost is gone.
Wrote about the full breakdown across payers, providers, and pharma here: onhealthcare.tech/p/the-free-lun…
