Don't know if anyone has posted this stuff on Medsite.Com, so here goes(3 articles). The last one is long, but explains a lot about the internet site. All comes from their website, http://www.medsite.com/ You might want to listen to this realplayer CNBC interview on Medsite.Com. http://www.medsite.com/press/cnbc.html
The Future Plans are Bright for Medsite.com
June 17, 1999
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn., (Reuters) - Medsite.com Inc., a company offering a range of medical services and products over the Internet, said Thursday it planned to take the company public this fall.
"We're looking at this fall for an IPO (initial public offering)," Sundeep Bhan, chairman and chief executive officer, told Reuters at the 1999 US Bancorp Piper Jaffray Conference.
Bhan and three other graduates of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania founded the Web site, located at medsite.com, in 1997.
Offerings on the site include MedBookStore.com, which sells over 100,000 medical titles, MedSupplies.com, which sells discounted medical supplies and MedMail.com which offers medical professionals free e-mail.
The site attracts 6,500 customers each day. About sixty percent of Medsite.com's revenues come from electronic commerce transactions, while 40 percent come from its program called Pharmadirect, which is an alliance with various pharmaceutical companies, Bhan said.
Under the Pharmadirect program, doctors can collect so-called "digital coupons" for savings on books and medical supplies offered on Medsite.com after they review product information on drugs provided by pharmaceutical companies, which subsidize the digital coupons, Bhan said.
But Medsite.com faces a crowded field. It has links to 500 other medical-related Web sites, some of which offer the same services.
For example, Medsite.com has a link on Healtheon Corp.'s WebMD portal. Both companies offer doctors and medical professionals e-mail, access to medical journals and sales of medical supplies.
Bhan acknowledged the overlap, but said the Internet is so vast that there will always be other opportunities.
"If you look at the services that are being offered out there, I think we can all say that in the next six to 18 months there is going to be a lot of consolidation in our sector," Bhan said. "But I think there is still room out there. As consolidation happens, we are talking with other Web sites."
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Medsite.com and HealthStream Form Strategic Partnership
June 23, 1999
NEW YORK (BUSINESS WIRE) --- MedUniversity.com Venture to Revolutionize Online Healthcare Education -- Medsite.com, the leading provider of eServices for the medical community, today announced a strategic partnership agreement with HealthStream, the nation's leading provider of online healthcare education, to bring about together the future of online healthcare education.
Under the agreement, Medsite.com will launch MedUniversity.com, a service designed to meet the complete continuing education needs of healthcare professionals. MedUniversity.com will feature a comprehensive library of interactive education courses offered through Medsite.com's healthcare partners. These institutions will have the option to provide the service on their Web sites and over their own Intranets. In addition, each organization can provide its own proprietary educational content.
HealthStream will provide the online content library as well as its proprietary technology, which will be used to manage the online university. HealthStream currently provides the Web's largest library of continuing education for medical professionals, including over 500 hours of CME for Family Practice, Internal Medicine, and Emergency Medicine physicians.
"This partnership marks a new day for the professional medical community," said Sanjay Pingle, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Marketing for Medsite.com. "Medsite.com's introduction of online health education to our current customer base of 300,000 medical professionals further enhances our position as the leading provider of eServices to the medical community."
"Clearly the biggest winner in this partnership is the medical professional," says Robert A. Frist, Jr., Chief Executive of HealthStream, "HealthStream has an unparalleled focus in delivering online solutions to the $6 billion healthcare education market and our partnership with Medsite.com will make engaging, affordable education a reality to 5 million medical professionals."
The partnership between Medsite and HealthStream is one of several strategic moves Medsite has made over the past few months. Most recently, on June 6, 1999, Medsite acquired CreativeAspect, Inc., which provides powerful Web based calendar, email, and collaboration software as well as a membership of over 25,000 registered users. Medsite has focused other moves on reinforcing its ties to the medical community and has added to its list of association partners two strong, enduring partnerships with the American Association of Psychiatrists (AAP) and the American Preventative Medical Association (AMPA).
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THE MAGIC OF E
Silicon India, July 1999
In the heart of New York City's self-dubbed Silicon Alley, across from Doubleclick in the dot-com zone, in a breezy loft next to the world-famous Crunch gym, four guys from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business have figured out how to successfully crack an e-commerce niche market. Sundeep Bhan, CEO of Medsite.com, along with his executives -- former college buddies Sanjay Pingle, Sameer Shariff and Rajnish Kapoor -- make it quickly evident to anyone who meets them that there is a lot of sharp strategic instinct and creative content behind the youthful eagerness in their eyes.
Starting out as an Internet center for online medical information, Medsite.com?s obvious offspring was a niche Amazon-style specialized online bookshop called Medbookstore.com. To the surprise of the founders, it has rapidly evolved into a massive healthcare portal, with products and services aimed at changing the way doctors work. Today, Medsite.com is a collection of Web sites that provides medical professionals with medical books, supplies, journal subscription, and free personal Web-based e-mail. ?Medsite.com is not just a bookstore,? Dr. Ashok Jain, a Detroit-based investor and medical advisor to Medsite.com, explained. ?It?s a portal, which has lot of channels and content, such as Medmoney.com, which is designed to meet the investment needs of medical professionals.? When users visit Medmoney.com, they find specific news on healthcare industry stocks and online trading. Medical professionals can apply online for loans or a credit card; the site is tied into Medsupplies.com, from which they can make medical supply purchases or leasing.
Medsite.com is a portal that has already developed a gargantuan reputation. ?Actually, what really sparked the traffic was in December of ?97 when CNN did a story on the three best medical sites and they picked us, along with the Mayo Clinic and the AMA. Two hundred fifty thousand people came to Medsite.com that weekend? they played that clip all over the world,? Shariff remembered.
When Medsite.com began to conceptualize its strategy, it understood that the medical community had developed interdependencies unlike any other industry, which made it predisposed to use Medsite.com-type services. First, doctors have a need to be educated on the latest treatments, research and new medications and therapies in order to expand their businesses. Therefore, they spend considerable investment money in journal research to keep up to date in their fields of specialization. Second, the journals and publications that maintain and disseminate critical updated medical information rely upon the medical community for continued sponsorship, and hence, they also have mutual gains from the research being conducted by pharmaceutical researchers. The third angle is that of the pharmaceutical companies who spend large sums of money on various types of advertising and educational initiatives to promote their latest products and treatments to medical practitioners, and to drive up prescriptions of new medicines.
According to Shariff, the inherent infrastructure of the healthcare industry allowed Medsite.com to cast itself in a curiously well-positioned role early on, and in this role lies the key to their unique business success. ?We have built relationships with physicians, the healthcare industry and pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies alone spend $8 billion a year trying to get their message across to the doctors. We can help them because we have the customer base and the medium.?
Making a Living From Bad Spelling
The ripening of the Internet in conjunction with the timing of Medsite.com?s evolution created a clear opportunity, if only the young executives could crystallize and develop targeted services that opened up the relationships between these three groups and made their time and dollars more effective.
Inseparable through college, Sundeep, Sanjay, Sameer and Raj spent late nights dreaming up business ideas. Anticlimactically, they parted ways to take ?real world? jobs. Bhan credits one phone conversation, in which they realized they were busy making other people successful, with the realization that together, they could be successful themselves. The boys quickly quit their jobs, put everything they owned into a U-Haul (?I had some furniture, a computer and together we had about $5,000,? said Bhan) and they headed to a new loft that doubled as an office space. ?When we first started, we were warned about working with friends. But the entire reason we?re successful is friendship. It takes us through the downs ? and we?ve enjoyed the ups together more than we would have enjoyed them by ourselves,? commented Shariff.
Since then, their rise has been swift and definitely unconventional. When Bhan was a pre-med student, he experienced difficulty in spell-checking medical terms on his papers, and this fueled his first business concept. The guys got together and created a medical spellchecker, which was then sold to the widely known medical publisher, Mosby. Medsite.com was originally born to promote such initial products online, while creatively luring visitors to the site with all kinds of healthcare information.
Amazon.com?s Healthy Competition
The unexpectedly high volume of visitors to Medsite.com drove the four to cement their relationship with suppliers and create medbookstore.com. ?To start out, we had no money to do the marketing. We were looking at how we could build marketshare without advertising, PR, or any of the traditional ways of doing it,? said Pingle, vice president of marketing for Medsite.com. ?And so, we identified where the bulk of medical professionals were going on the Internet. We used the bookstore to build alliances with each one of those organizations,? continued Pingle.
In order to accomplish this, they established and focused on e-relationships with 250 of the largest medical companies with a Web presence, including Medscape, Healthgate, Physicians Online and Web M.D. ?Our marketing strategy was that we were going to get the Internet real estate and the major Web sites in the medical field [allied with us],? explained Shariff.
Apart from the Internet, there were other brand names in the medical field that would help Medsite.com achieve its reputation in the marketplace: the American Medical Association being the largest. ?Getting that was a big coup. That basically gave us credibility,? Shariff said. Immediately after the AMA score, Pingle went about setting up alliances with various universities and the American Medical Students Association (AMSA), which really gave a boost to book sales.
Their success was grounded in their interruption of the conventional medical marketplace and relief of consumer?s most significant issues: big markups, overpriced products, very limited selection, long lines, limited inventory. Medsite.com now boasts altogether about 250,000 regular users, and they get close to 50,000 hits a day
Amazon.com: TheObvious Threat?
What is the competition from Amazon.com and other online bookstores? ?This is a unique thing in that it only deals with medical resources and products which is a $2 billion industry,? explained Jain. ?Amazon is not focused on the healthcare industry; neither are Barnes & Noble and other such bookstores, so Medsite.com is uniquely positioned with more than 100,000 medical books and CDs, including very obscure and rare titles relating to very specialized medical areas.?
But more significantly, the services base has taken a wide tangent from the simple online bookstore concept. The timing couldn?t have been more perfect. ?The medical community is notoriously behind in information technology, as it has not been fully automated yet, and it is therefore mostly paper shuffling,? Jain reminisced. ?The industry and its players, however had a lot of money to spend ? about a trillion dollars.? And the e-based services the young men decided to provide struck precisely the right chord with doctors all over the world who were starting to get Internet-active.
Bhan said the bookstore has evolved into more service channels, and now they are in the process of providing customization of each channel for each individual doctor. Then Medsite.com expects to be in a position not only to provide products and services, but also to leverage the existing infrastructure to give pharmaceutical companies a chance to get directly in front of the doctor, through a series of e-commerce initiatives. ?We?re in this unique space where we are the nexus between the drug industry and the medical professional,? said Bhan.
Here?s an example of how this works: a cardiologist buys a cardiology-specific book at a reduced rate, maybe even below cost. Medsite.com requests a pharmaceutical company to subsidize the cost of the book and pay Medsite.com a premium to get right in front of the doctor via the Internet for a chance to sell the merits of their cardiac medication.
Prescription for Success
This same dynamic space has made it lucrative for a new concept Bhan calls PharmaDirect, which allows the drug company to sponsor and get involved in subsidizing publications, and getting the opportunity to directly educate healthcare professionals on the benefits of their product. ?We?re getting that information to the doctor, who will read about the drug, fill out a questionnaire testing their understanding of what they read and once it?s verified, they then receive an instant $25 off a related publication,? explained Bhan. The pharmaceutical company will be satisfied with the direct marketing opportunity, a benefit that will hopefully drive up prescriptions.
It is pioneering ideas such as these that has given the greatest boost to Medsite.com. This year, they plan to aggressively enter into various channels, each providing a unique niche service to make the bond between healthcare practitioners, product providers and patients much more personal. ?We?ve got a lot of really great ideas and we?ve identified the right channels that we?re going to be creating. So as we develop each new service, we?re aligning ourselves with a key partner, a key strategic backer,? Bhan said. ?Last year, we were really focused on building that [bookstore] channel, but since we did such a good job, we have used that to build other channels.?
To supplement their growth plans, now, in mid-?99, they have made two acquisitions, one of which is a technology company called Creative Aspects. The former owner, Brian Shin, has joined Bhan?s executive team and brings with him Web-based e-mail technology and a Web-based calendar, for CME and trade show schedules. ?Basically we acquired the company as we plan to use the technology to enhance the doctor/patient relationship, by leveraging value-added services, such as secured e-mail or a pager notification service,? said Bhan. The free MedMail service now already has about 100,000 e-mail subscribers. Other expansion plans currently in the works include MedUniversity.com, which will provide virtual online healthcare courses for credit, and MedMarketplace.com, which will provide a wide variety of shopping for regular needs of doctors and other busy medical professionals.
On a more financial note, having raised over $12 million so far, and closing in on about $25 million, the foursome is confidently looking forward to an IPO in the fourth quarter of 1999 and to about $50 million in revenues by 2000. Jain said confidently, ?If, by chance, the market forces change tomorrow, the group?s e-commerce strategies are so flexible, they will clearly be in a position to alter their course of direction to continue to support the medical community.?
Medsite.com is all about how to do a niche portal Web site, keep it on the cutting edge, expand it into an e-commerce engine as the market and consumers demand, and how to just sit back and let it get bigger and bigger. Sound simple? Didn?t selling books and supplies always sound like it was simple business? |
