Why is Valley firm Greylock -- which has Facebook, Pandora and Zipcar in its portfolio, as well as advertainment producer The Box -- putting four million bucks into an Indian healthcare tech company? Because HealthHiway, in Greylock's view, has the potentional to become India's Salesforce.com for the medical industry.
"Tech infrastructure between hospitals, labs, doctors, insurers, is far behind what we have here in the U.S.," Greylock's director of marketing, Erika Brown (yes, the former Forbes reporter) told me in a phone interview. "HealthHiWay is using the Saas platform that we also take for granted here."
Here's the boilerplate product listing from Greylock's press release:
"HealthHiway offers solutions for Hospitals, Insurance and TPAs, Clinicians and Physician & Practitioners segment. The range of solutions includes ClaimsConnectTM (Electronic Claims Management), ClinicConnectTM (Practice management & patient Administration Solution) ImageConnectTM (Teleradiology and PACS solution). More products like HIS, Learning Management etc are in the pipeline. HealthHiway currently has a network of over 250 hospitals and will also connect over 1000 clinics and Physician practices over the next few months."
"If you're a doctor in India," Brown said, "You won't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build out a data center. You can buy a PC with an Internet connection." HealthHiway expects to be able to license its tools for as low as 10,000 Indian rupees, or just over $200, per year.