For the exclusive use of F. Habib

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REV: DECEMBER 5, 2012

ROBERT F. HIGGINS
PENROSE O’DONNELL
MEHUL BHATT

Kyruus: Big Data's Search for the Killer App
“At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why.”
“First came radical advancements in computer technology: this dramatically reduced the cost of compiling and analyzing vast amounts of baseball data. Then came the boom in baseball players’ salaries: this dramatically raised the benefits of having such knowledge. ‘If we’re going to pay these guys $150,000 a year [1977] to do this…we should at least know how good they are’… If this sounded compelling when …show more content…

The company’s second option was to expand its reach within hospitals. Kyruus could develop tools for physician network development and patient referral operations. Early conversations with hospital CEOs and CFOs suggested that optimizing patient referrals was a top priority for hospitals.
Reducing “leakage” of patients to other institutions was expected to significantly impact a hospital’s bottom line. The market potential for this product was sizeable, and expected to be far larger than the compliance market. The team still had much to learn in order to develop and sell the referral and network products. Finally, the company could put more weight behind selling to the life sciences industry (e.g. pharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostics companies). Several team members felt that the budgets of these organizations were much larger than hospital budgets and that the shorter sales cycles made them logical clients. Kyruus had already developed a few products that were well received by industry sales forces, and many on the Kyruus team saw this channel as a potentially very profitable market.
Underlying all these options was the fundamental question of whether, when, and how to engage physicians themselves. During the first year of product and market development, Gardner and Yoo had chosen to serve hospital administrators in the management of their physician staff. However,
Gardner was a big fan of “feedback loops” and