Telemedicine As A Service

Reflection Paper

Sector: Health Care Client: Hygeia Tel Challenge: Strategizing a pricing model along with marketing strategy for a new business venture Results: Delivered a business model which primarily focused on marketing, pricing and competitor analysis

What did I learn? I have always been curious of how consultants work and solve mammoth problem by their experience working in and with a broad range of businesses. In addition to that, gaining knowledge about companies all stages of growth: Existence, Survival, Success, Take-Off and Maturity are very important factors for a consultant to know before solving the business problem. Finally once the knowledge about the business is gained it is equally important to follow a structured approach which helps the consultant to succeed in the achieving the solution. An individual can gain broad and narrow stroke experience by working in respective field but learning how to approach a problem and solve on their own would be a difficult task. With an intention of learning how to Approach a problem and help a company to solve their problem, I enrolled for the Management and Organizational consulting class. During the entire course work, I learnt and gained experience about the complete Business Consulting process which is a follow: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Learning about the business Identifying the problems Identifying future opportunities Performing analysis Providing solutions through a concrete plan Adjusting plan based on the feedback

In addition to following the above process, it is very important for a consultant to develop a structured approach which comprises of Situation, Complication, Questions, and Hypothesis. This approach helped me and my teammates to narrow down as much as possible on the actual objective of the topic. Once an approach has been defined it is very crucial to present our approach using an appropriate structure viz. Inductive Structure & Deductive Structure. In addition to that, supporting conclusions and data/analysis support the main argument in a pyramid structure (What Why How) This approach helped me to learn real consulting, use different solutions and narrow down our strategy on market segmentation, pricing strategy for the segment followed by competitor analysis. Finally, I learnt how to interact with clients and deal with them in getting information about the business, products and to think out of the box to provide exceptional solution.

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How did the project go? First and foremost, we got to know about our clients business and more specially learnt about the telemedicine platform they were advancing on / building up. We got to know about telemedicine platform, its rich set of features and the motto behind developing this service. Its was very critical to learn about the business and the product which helped us out in finding the ins and outs of the business entails. Once we acquired sufficient information about the Telemedicine from our client we researched more about similar product available in the market, compared their features, identified barriers and found out about the opportunities in the current market scenario. During that period of time we met our client who gave us his feedback on our research and demonstrated the telemedicine device along with its functionality which helped us a lot in analyzing market segments. Our client also wanted to learn about barriers for telemedicine, existing & potential competitors, their approach, and what segment of market they were focusing on. After identifying the problems and opportunities of the business, we focused on two major things which we wanted to propose to our client: a) Market Segmentation (Current & Future) b) Pricing Strategy for the telemedicine platform. Based on our key finding, data we gathered from Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), data analysis and the features we offered to the customers we came with marketing segments and also pricing strategy for our products. In short, we took a micro view at the business and provided solutions for the macro outlook, strategizing for the future success of our clients business. An important step in business consulting process is to get feedback from the client and based on their inputs and valuable suggestions adjust the proposed solution. Based on our proposed solution our client wanted to know more about how companies offering telemedicine worked with the mobile service providers such as T mobile, AT&T and Verizon. Based on your research and key finding we came to know that major manufacturers of telemedicine device have a tieup with the mobile service provider which offers them both good data service and potential customer base. We suggested our client to work with not so popular mobile service provider like Metro PCS to tie up for getting data facility. In addition to all the above processes, we also employed SWOT analysis for better analysis and which helped to evaluate the Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats involved in the business venture. Overall our client was really happy with the approach/solution we had provided and also with the market segment we suggested to start off the business with.

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Would I approach this differently if I am given one more opportunity to do a similar project? Oscar wilde said Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes and I would certainly second his thought. Initially when our team started the project we tried to focus on a very broad spectrum and at the same time tried to provide a solution to each and every problem we came across which was certainly not the right approach. In addition to that, at the start of the project we were just aware of what the clients business was and their expectation of developing a marketing strategy for their new product. We didnt ask our client specific details which would help us in coming with a marketing strategy and more importantly problems they wanted us to focus on. But from our class presentation and discussion with Dr. Padmakumar Nair, Dr. Jefffrey Hicks and with our client we restructured our approach and focus on providing key solutions which would help our client is marketing their product well. To be more specific, if I am given one more opportunity working on a similar project, I would follow our approach but will try to focus more on analyzing the problem, also provide a pricing model which illustrates how certain expenses can be reduced, how certain profits can be maximized, and more importantly would also develop a very solid Business Strategy and Model which would help any similar start-up company to drive their business forward.

Overall feeling about the success of the project In the beginning our approach was very broad but gradually we narrowed it down and made our project more structured and focused. With the guidance of Dr. Nair, Jeffrey Hicks we changed our approach and followed a very structured approach to give the best business solution to our client. We concentrated on market segmentation, pricing strategy for the segment and also on the competitor analysis. The greatest compliment we received was in our final presentation when the professor was really happy with the improvement we made in comparison to our first presentation. So I feel our hard work paid off and we managed to give our best in the end. Finally, I would thank Dr. Padmakumar Nair, and Dr. Jeffrey Hicks for making the course interesting by all the interesting articles and sharing their real life experiences with the class.

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