“Imagine you meet your girlfriend for brunch, and you are sweating her new taupe Marc Jacobs Kitty Clutch. Then imagine that you snap a picture of her purse with your iPhone, which uses an eBay app to reveal the three boutiques within a 3-mile radius that have the same bag in the same color in stock right this minute, with prices to boot. You decide which store has the best combination of price and location, and order via your phone. After brunch, you swing by and bypass the line because you show the salesperson your digital receipt. Voilà! Your new Marc Jacobs clutch — and all the pleasure of instant gratification.” – How Jack Abraham is Reinventing eBay. (Fast Company, August 2011).
Health Care: Imagine you are an operating room nurse and it is your first month on the job. You want to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. After all, your education was supported with questions answered in 0.18 seconds by Google and the thousands of nurse training videos on YouTube. Learning seems easy nowadays. But now you are faced with a sterile core full of products that you would never see on Amazon. The Head Nurse asked you to get the X from the core. You find it, but what is it? You snap a picture with your iPhone, which uses its WikiHospital app to connect you to instructional videos made by the manufacturer, a copy of the user manual, a user-generated product synopsis, user reviews, or 24/7 troubleshooting support via instant message. Now, you know everything.
Retail: eBay hopes to change the retail game. Going into a store to browse is considered offline shopping. Fusing online and offline shopping is the future of retail they say. This is not hard to believe. All of us have bought something knowing there must be a website out there where we could have gotten a better deal. Or traditionally, we know there might be a cheaper price at “that store” in the suburbs. Thankfully, eBay plans to help you zap a product barcode with your smartphone so an app can show you where to find that product at the best price, using the least amount of effort to get to it. There is no doubt we are checking our smartphones while we wait in line anyway. Might as well put that time to good use.
If this concept is a hub, it has an infinite number of spokes. Zap a product’s barcode at your friend’s house and find out who made it, how much it costs (on average, in a specific geographical area, for example), see user-generated reviews and watch an instructional video. Better yet, press “order” and have one shipped instantaneously to your brother for Christmas – charge it to your PayPal account.
Health Care: Think of the spokes that could support the skills of our nurses. Think of the impact on patient care. If you work in a hospital, you know that products are always changing, and there are thousands of different products that apply to each of the many medical specialties. Similarly, you know that you are faced with different patients everyday that are faced with different problems. What’s frustrating is that, like with anything, you know that someone “knows the answer” to whatever question you might have. But life moves too fast sometimes, just like when we don’t have time to drive to that “other store”. The ideas driving the future of retail could help patient care, and hopefully it will. What’s more important, the price of a Marc Jacobs clutch or the information-access for the nurse who takes care of your Mother, my Brother, his Sister, their Dad?
The challenge: The medical device industry is wildly different than the consumer market and engaging the right people to initiate such ideas wouldn’t be easy. Or would it? This is another topic for discussion.