The long tail has been a hot potato among internet theorists. This concept created by Chris Anderson was first designed to explain how the internet could help to increase profitability ob marginal products. For instance if we talk about books, an internet retailler such as Amazon is able to have millions of books in their catalogs while a few thousands of them are making 80 per cent of the sales for brick and mortar distribution channels.  The last 20% accounts for million of references that are hardly directly available directly in a classical book store. However, the little costs offered by the internet business model (huge storage facilities, JIT (Just in Time) supply management…) make it economically viable to sell these last 20%. (note: the long tail approach is indeed an inverted Pareto law, the 20 prevailling over the 80%!)

What is the long tail approach in terms of medical procedure?

We could take a close eye on rare medical needs. Looking at the US population we know that approximately 8% of the population suffers from rare health conditions representing a list of 6000 health conditions, all representing niches compared to mainstream activities. Hospitals on the other side are not able to store the medical competencies to tackle these rare health issues (medical technology, rare decease specialists…). An hospital if not able to answer demand will advise a patient to go to another hospital. However, the reactivity of this chain is long (themedian time for rare condition diagnosis is 6 months but the average time over 3 years!) and depends on information available. In fact not that many doctors are aware of all the rare conditions while on the other side getting to know the specialists that could cure this condition can be dificult.

There is perhaps also a double wrong side of the curve effect: rare condition specialists are difficult to find as information about these rare conditions are scattered and discrete. The internet despite increasing the information available is lacking plateforms that will structure the inofrmation flow for all (technical and non technical information seekers). Some initiatives for profesional exist though such as the website Mymedwork where specialists gather in communities to exchange medical information (a more qualified community website than Facebook in a word…)

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On the wrong side of the curve: rare conditions…

Medical tourism by pooling a vast number of hospitals is also pooling a vast number of specialists able to tackle a series of rare disease. The catalog of medical procedures is directly available and the time of response only depends on the abaility of the medical tourism agency to tie up quickly with the appropriate medical specialists. Though 80% of the existing medical procedures are available in a brick and mortar hospital, a click and mortar hospital(namely an hospital selling its services through internet) is the only type of hospital able to cover the spectrum of the medical services.

An efficient medical tourism e tailler could be the appropriate click and mortar hospital solution because of its ability to pool a vast number of hospitals in different countries where the technology used are sometimes exclusive to one hospital (for instance some practices done at the Parkway hospital in Singapore)… Nevertheless the medical tourism websites only focus on basic medical procedures, on cosmetic surgery (mammaplasty, rhinoplasty etc etc)

As of now it remains to be seen if the market opportunity contained in these 20% ofrare medical procedures could generate an appropriate engine, namely a medical tourism website that will focus on offering the largest number of medical services possible.

It is a new paradigm: a qualitative approach and not cost based… We will try to further dig into this subject by doing a better market sizing…