Recently, a colleague asked me about the Clinical Communications and Collaboration market. He wanted to know if I thought the market was saturated, if there would be a consolidation of vendors and solutions or if the market was beginning to slow. The answer is clear if you subscribe to the theory of diffusion of innovation. The theory was developed by E.M. Rogers in 1962 and popularized by Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, a book about the marketing of technology and innovation. Simply explained, the technology adoption lifecycle has five main market segments made up of Innovators – 2.5%, Early Adopters – 13.5%, Early Majority – 34%, Late Majority – 34% and Laggards – 16%.

market-saturation-graph

The Clinical Communications and Collaboration market is primarily made up of acute care hospitals, of which there are just over 3900 in the U.S. Although the market certainly includes more than just the acute care facility, and internationally the number is much bigger, I use this number to be conservative in my analysis.

Now, if you add up all the current customers from all the vendors in the market, which is a difficult task in itself, there are, at the most, fewer than 500 acute care facilities that have purchased a comprehensive Clinical Communications and Collaboration solution. Throwing out the basic vendors, AKA text-only vendors or diaper vendors (write me if you want to know why they are called that), KLAS estimates the total number of actual customers are fewer than 270.

That would put the current market saturation between 7 – 13%. Clearly still in the Early Adopters segment and on the verge of mass adoption by the Early Majority. We are experiencing this here at Mobile Heartbeat where we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the trend. We have developed the most reliable and feature-rich solution available with massive scalability and unprecedentedly high user satisfaction, and it is currently installed in the nation’s biggest healthcare facilities and systems. We have also created valuable partnerships and collaborated with companies like Cisco, GE, Apple, Airwatch and others to bring a reliable, enterprise-scalable and full-featured solution to the innovators, pragmatists, conservatives, and even the skeptics.

We at Mobile Heartbeat measure our growth, not by the number of facilities where we are installed, but by the number of satisfied customers we have actually using our solution. User adoption is the key metric and the number we look for when assessing the market and our own success.