How does offering a free, ad-supported model change the proposition?
Ryan Howard: There are multiple barriers to entry. Cost is the biggest one. When you look at the marketplace, 80 percent of doctors practice in offices of eight physicians or less. The average general practitioner in California makes $140,000 a year. If software companies charge $40,000 for their electronic medical record, this is really taking a chunk out of their pay. They pretty much cannot afford the technology. The second biggest hurdle is implementation. Doctors don’t have the expertise or aptitude to install the hardware or software or database connectivity. To have a consultant on site is really expensive. The part of the model that makes a lot of sense is having a managed service, which is what our cloud-based [a system in which people use the Web to access business applications that are available remotely through a tech infrastructure or “cloud”] service offers them. With your ad-supported model, isn’t there a concern that ads for pharmaceuticals that pop up when doctors are
