Jason, welcome to Hospital Impact. In 1996, I made a futurist presentation at the International Telemedicine conference in San Diego, predicting what you are offering here.

The conference was dominated in attendence by Phyician's with MBA's, who were C-level in conglomerates. I met my first physician CTO and my first physician CFO at this conference.

On the side lines, the conversations sounded like hallway discussions at Oracle or other heavy hitters in high tech. The conversations were not about people, quality of care or an enthusiasm for supporting innovations in health care.

The conversations were about vertical channels and how to meet shareholder value.

The real innovation from the conference was revealed by the CTO (non physician) of Mayo Clinic, who had a "friendship" with his physician leader and wanted to discover how to "do good" volunteering time and delivery of service to area rurally remote from Mayo. The physician CTO from UCLA medical center's warm intelligence was about a learning adventure he had with the UCLA neurosurgeon's who had something remarkable to offer and had to create an outreach to the world, because there was not a sufficient number of patients in the LA area to help this team give their best.

When I finally made my presentation, I was booed by physicians, when I explained we were entering a time of the "intelligent consumer" who clicked and
traveled through vistas of learning on the Internet.

By the end of the presentation, the only participants left in my room were all women and 3 were leaders in the elder care industry.

This was difficult market research for me. It told me it was time to abandon and put my business plan on the shelf.

You cannot change the world. Today, I have learned my growing edge is in a market of innovation that is served by
Strategy + Business Magazine,. The readership for this magazine cuts across all related health care sectors and supports small intelligent boutique companies where energy is not wasted on
discussions about how there is not enough talent and how the younger generation does not work well with the older generation.

In this niche are the 10% of intelligent people who want to do good work and that gives the consumer what they want and provides a vehicle out of which people can work to learn and use what they know in the marketplace.

Welcome to my niche. I viewed your Web 2.0 initiative. It is solid. I am still biased toward the new Adobe platform and heck it is not about software. Ultimately any business plan is only as good as the people working it and the consumers who value from it.

I predict good things for your group.