H-Source another Amazon
H-Source another Amazon...
"Aside from excess inventories, the Company has also addressed the possibility of including OEM and/or third party products on the platform. This one is interesting to us, but we think it also has some caveats that we won’t belabor but will at least address. First, establishing a virtual marketplace where a host of enterprises can market/sell their products to others is a proven model. Amazon is of course the glaring example although there are certainly others as well. That approach has been especially attractive to sellers (largely businesses and/or OEMs) that may lack the ability to afford and/or scale broad marketing and distribution campaigns. Clearly there are examples of products that experienced wild success that absent the Amazon platform would likely never have done so. While selling OEM healthcare products in a virtual marketplace certainly has some unique caveats that for instance, selling a winter coat on Amazon may not, there are some similarities worth noting. In the end, since the advent of the internet, many industries have seen their legacy distribution chains disintermediated, disrupted and even dismantled because of the efficiencies and the transparencies provided by open virtual markets. In an industry rife with inefficiency, it is almost hard to believe that healthcare supply chains have not been dragged kicking and screaming into the same paradigm. Again, we think there are good reasons why healthcare supply chains have not been substantially impacted by technology, but there are also good reasons why they should be and as with other industries, the good reasons often boil down to better transparency. Increased transparency is not always good for everyone in an industry. Like the mandating of electronic medical records technology, we suspect healthcare is going to find itself in the cross hairs of additional technological change, either as a matter of economic necessity, government edict or both. We can see advantages for (some) OEMs as well as for their customers to utilize exchanges/platforms like H-Sources and we can envision some resistance as well."
