Welcome to… The Harbor ⚓

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Over the past year, we’ve been building, and re-building our API marketplace. From the beginning, Healthie saw the opportunity to create an environment that shared the API connections we had to help enable our customers 👥. But, as we thought about what we wanted our marketplace to stand for, we felt it needed a name to match our intent for what the marketplace would mean to our customers and the rest of digital health. 

Traditionally, healthcare has been known to be slow to innovate relative to other industries. EHR integrations have been a key point of friction for vendors to win deals, so much so that landing  the right EHR partnerships can be a key part of a go-to-market strategy. Overall, this feels quite similar to marketplaces 🛒.

As marketplaces grow in size, they grow in power as well. There’s stories of established companies going out of business for refusing to list their products on Amazon. In my hometown, one farmer’s market has a nine year wait to get a stall. The “place” in the marketplace is the real winner in traditional marketplaces. 

When you think about a harbor, what comes to mind? A marina with many boats ⛴️. Cargo ships. Cranes moving shipping containers. Many of the world’s greatest cities are built on what have been the most important harbor’s for centuries. Harbor’s have been a critical piece of trade infrastructure for millenia, helping facilitate the seamless flow of goods, imports and exports. 

The Harbor Benefits

The benefits of what happens at a harbor stretch far beyond the harbor itself. 

Did you know the Los Angeles harbor sees a volume of more than 112,00 cars per year? Or, ships out more than 180,000 containers of animal feed? These goods are then shipped all around the country for the benefit of millions. 

The Harbor is designed with the same purpose in mind: to create benefits that reach far beyond the Harbor itself. The primary benefactors being clinicians, staff members, and patients.

At Healthie’s Harbor, you could say there’s 5 key boats docked in the Harbor ⚓

1. Healthie customers. Our customers are at the core of why Healthie and the Harbor exists. It’s an opportunity for them to find additional resources to help run their business or enhance the Healthie offering. 
2. Healthie integrations. These are integrations built by Healthie to help create the Healthie offering. Platforms like Zoom and Stripe help run essential parts of Healthie. 
3. Partner integrations. Integrations built by partners are growing by the dozens and are the lifeforce of the harbor. This ever-growing category makes Healthie more powerful than it could be on its own. Some of our longest standing partners have hundreds of mutual customers with us. 
4. Service partners. Running a business effectively is more than just having the right tools. Service partners help supercharge your team’s efficiency and sometimes even the tools themselves. We’ve seen customers have tremendous success using third-party development firms. 
5. The final participant is Healthie. We’re more so the participant hands-on building the docks, the shipping routes in and out 🛳️, placing the buoys 🛟, and so on.  We’re here to provide a standardized method of trade 🤝 through our APIs. We’re here to export and import data - processing hundreds of millions of API calls every month. As a participant, we’re working to encourage trade by bringing co-marketing activities to our partners and educating our customers on ways that partners can help them meet their business objectives and KPIs.

Harbors are constantly growing and upgrading their infrastructure. Here at Healthie we’re doing the same. We’re constantly working to improve our APIs, available webhooks, and better support developers.

This is why we felt renaming from Marketplace → Harbor was more reflective of the value exchange occurring in its truest form. So, please join us in the Harbor here and help us facilitate more trade and value for all of healthcare ⚓.