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Key Takeaways Oliver Kharraz is the founder and CEO of the healthcare marketplace site Zocdoc.
He explained that disruption playbooks don’t work in healthcare because the field faces a “complex systems and incentives problem,” not a technology issue.
Walmart Health and IBM Watson Health are two examples of healthcare initiatives that fell flat.
Walmart and IBM thought they could fix healthcare. Zocdoc’s founder and CEO, Oliver Kharraz, says they missed the point.
In a new commentary piece for Fortune, Kharraz explained that healthcare is harder to disrupt than giants like Walmart and IBM expected. Kharraz is the CEO of Zocdoc, the $2.3 billion healthcare marketplace that helps patients find and book appointments with doctors online. He comes from a 300-year family tradition of doctors.
“Don’t mistake me. Healthcare desperately needs fixing and people who are willing to take ambitious swings at improving it,” Kharraz wrote. “But nowhere is it more true that ideas are easy and execution is hard than in healthcare.”
Many companies have tried to reinvent healthcare
Companies like Walmart and IBM entered healthcare with big ambitions. Both ultimately pulled back, Kharraz wrote.
Walmart opened low-cost clinics in 2019, promising transparent prices for primary and dental care. But by April 2024, it said it would close all 51 locations in five states and end its virtual-care business after rising costs and difficult insurance reimbursement made the model unprofitable.
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