Healthcare innovation has a new player
When CVS and Walgreens started offering clinical services, it wasn’t that hard to fathom. Both organizations have been leaders in the pharmacy space for years, so a move into a broader health position seemed logical.
When Walmart made a similar move, it felt like a stretch. But if you examine WalMart’s model, you remember that they’ve offered eye care services for quite some time. Adding clinics wasn’t a leap from sweatpants to flu shots, it was a next step from optometry.
Now another un-related industry is jumping into healthcare: cable companies.
Cox Communications, the nation’s 3rd largest cable and broadband provider, has teamed up with the Cleveland Clinic to announce Vivre Health, a telehealth organization that aims to help drive the transition of healthcare delivery into more American homes.
It’s not the first healthcare venture for Cox. They’ve also partnered with HealthSpot, who makes a sort of physician-meets-ATM kiosk. Imagine TD Bank’s highly publicized ATMs connecting you to a physician instead of a bank teller. Instead reading your debit card, it reads your blood pressure.
This new wave of big companies jumping into the space certainly makes for interesting possibilities. But after the failure of Google Health and Apple’s recent decision to dial back the healthcare monitoring services they alluded to for their iWatch, we’ll have to wait and see which of these ideas survives in the notoriously hostile-to-innovation healthcare market.