Twine Health Found a Niche for a Software in Health Care

Apps and software services for health care are proliferating–challenges and hackathons come up with great ideas week after week, and the app store contains hundreds of thousands of apps. The hard thing is creating a business model that sustains a good idea. To this end, health care incubators bring in clinicians to advise software developers. Numerous schemes of questionable ethics abound among apps (such as collecting data on users and their contacts). In this article, I’ll track how Twine Health tried different business models and settled on the one that is producing impressive growth for them today.

Andy Oram

Twine Health is a comprehensive software platform where patients and their clinicians can collaborate efficiently between visits to achieve agreed-upon goals. Patients receive support in a timely manner, including motivation for lifestyle changes and expertise for medication adjustments. I covered the company in a recent article that showed how the founders ran some clinical studies demonstrating the effectiveness of their service. Validation is perhaps the first step for any developer with a service or app they think could be useful. Randomized controlled trials may not be necessary, but you need to find out from potential users what they want to see before they feel secure prescribing, paying for, and using your service. Validation will differentiate you from the hoards of look-alike competitors with whom you’ll share your market.

Dr. John Moore, co-founder of Twine Health, felt in 2013 that it was a good time to start a company, because the long-awaited switch in US medicine from fee-for-service to value-based care was starting to take root. Blue Cross and Blue Shield were encouraging providers to switch to Alternative Quality Contracts. The Affordable Care act of 2010 created the Medicare Shared Savings Program, which led to Accountable Care Organizations...