I was happy to see today’s HIStalk interview with Michael Weintraub, CEO of Humedica. This is a company that seems to have an innovative product coupled with an innovative business model that is positioned for greatness as health reform kicks into high gear.

Humedica’s offering has a value proposition is similar to that of analytics offerings from Microsoft and dbMotion: Extract data from transactional systems and make it “liquid”, apply some semantics to it, and allow users to navigate it and turn it into insight.

What appears to be different, from my outsiders perspective:

• The solution appears to be delivered via a SaaS model that requires no hardware or software purchases by the customer.
• The business model appears to be free to providers, with the revenue coming from the provision of de-identified data to researchers (pharma, etc).

While these differentiators may appear to be straightforward, they will have an important effect on the reach of Humedica’s business.

The value proposition for noodling on one’s data has near-universal appeal, but there are two classes of buyers: Those who “get it” and are willing to pay handsomely for tools that allow them to supercharge their existing efforts at process improvement, disease management, research, etc.; and those who don’t “get it” but just think it’s cool to be able to do these type of things. The latter outnumber the former by about 10:1 in the provider space, meaning that the majority of the provider market for this type of offering is extremely price sensitive.

Humedica has the potential to navigate around this problem by making analytics effectively free to the provider in both time and money. And if they can build all the internal plumbing for each provider on the dime of research sponsors in pharma etc., they should be able to turn around and monetize that asset by delivering additional use cases at extremely low cost and charging handsome fees to providers and payers.

I’ve ranted about business models before, it’s nice to see some smart people who seem to have done the right thing by delivering an innovative product and service with a commensurately innovative business model.