Respectfully, I disagree with your assessment of their business. Anybody who has ever worked for an enterprise startup knows that requests for custom installations and implementations of your product are a dime a dozen. No startup will ever win a RFP from a big company and it's just a time waster. I would say not only is drchrono taking the right path, it's the only possible path to getting into the larger hospitals. Once they've refined their product and built up a name for themselves, they only need to win that one bigger contract and they are off to the races. But what you are suggesting is simply impossible for a startup. And you should have known better than to contact drchrono for your large hospital, that's just irresponsible. If you didn't believe in their product then you were knowingly wasting their time.
I in no way thought Dr Chrono could respond to the RFP - that wasn't why I sent it to them - and I was very clear about why I was sending it to them and told them so. I said that I wanted to give them the RFP to see what they COULD cover within the requirements, that I was interested in seeing where they were in their capability and what market they were going with. I spoke to them on the phone as well and explained this.
I was sharing the RFP with them so they could see what an organization of that size specifically needed.
After this - they just took a few weeks and said "Nope we cant do that" but offered no analysis of their capabilities, which is fine. However it showed me that they were young and immature as a company when I then received several calls from their sales team trying to get me to sign up for the service as a physician.
I DO believe in their product, however in each of my exposures to them I see them faltering and operating a little blindly.
I want them to succeed - but it is plain foolish to say that getting a 1 - 10 physician private practice is the gateway to knocking on the door of a large hospital.
Those are totally different markets.
I followed up and said that they should seek out offering a tool to hospital physicians not under the premise of being an EMR - get the tool into the facility and let the physicians champion your product that way.
Epic, Cerner and Eclypsis are very very territorial and are not very open to working with scrappy startups like DrChrono... so they need to take a strategic approach.
Further, hospitals spend million upon millions on these systems. Saying that a free app with 44K in meaningful use funds support is going to really compete on the same level is just false.
I would do anything I can to help further their efforts - but lets deal with reality as well.
> I see them faltering and operating a little blindly.
What are they doing "blindly"? Can you offer specfics?
> I want them to succeed - but it is plain foolish to say that getting a 1 - 10 physician private practice is the gateway to knocking on the door of a large hospital.
I don't think they ever wanted to knock on the door of a large hospital. Why do you insist that they must find a way to do this? More importantly, why so immediately? Of course they know they can't compete with Epic, Cerner, etc. So they're not even trying.
It's quite possible that enough small practices adopt a system for it to be hard for big hospitals NOT to notice. Then hospitals will be knocking on their door. Many many markets have been disrupted this way, where the big players don't take small ones seriously until it's too late.
