Fueling subscription growth for medical reference app Epocrates

About Epocrates, part of Athenahealth

More than one million medical professionals depend on athenhealth’s epocrates app to provide essential decision-making support at the point of care. A 20 yearold home-built subscription platform could no longer support growth of the business. Implementing Vindicia Subscribe delivers a better experience for users, full integration of in-app purchases, flexible campaigns to attract new customers and increased retention of existing subscribers.

• Point-of-care medical app providing drug information, evidence-based disease diagnostics and treatment guidance to medical doctors.
• Founded in 1998, and one of the earliest apps available on the iPhone.
• More than one million healthcare professional users worldwide.
• Available as a free tier, and with B2C-style subscriptions to premium epocrates+ service for $16.99/month for individual physicians.
• B2B enterprise licenses available to health organizations and clinical teams.
• Up to 40% of subscriptions via Apple and Google app stores and in-app purchases.

Solution

• Vindicia Subscribe
• Integration with Apple and Google app stores for in-app purchases

Diagnosing the subscription business challenge

Building on 20 years of success

When epocrates launched in 1998 the medical doctors using the service were toting PalmPilots and using clunky desktop PCs. The era of the smartphone was still a decade away and the online subscription industry was so new that the company had no option but to build its own billing platform.

Fast forward two decades and more than a million smartphone-using physicians are relying on epocrates to support critical clinical decisions with up-to-date prescription drug information. But athenahealth realised the original technology had reached its limits and was limiting further growth of the service.

Support for new business models and more effective customer acquisition and retention were becoming harder and slower to implement. In turn this was taking development effort and budget away from developing the core healthcare tools.

Moving beyond a home-grown platform

Athenahealth considered rebuilding its own subscription management system—after all the original platform had served the company well for many years. But the business quickly realised that its core strength is in building healthcare tools, not trying to create a new billing solution. A huge development effort would have been needed to support the company’s ambitions to drive flexible business models and revenue growth.

That feeling was echoed by athenahealth’s developers: the old platform was unloved by technical staff who preferred to invest their time in developing a better product. Careful economic analysis also revealed the true cost of maintaining and updating the ageing in-house platform, taking up three or four software engineers’ time. And crucially, athenahealth recognized the value of tapping into wider industry experience, bringing in deep understanding of successful subscription business, with out-of-the-box tools to support the entire subscription lifecycle.

Supporting in-app purchases

In-app purchases (IAP) form a substantial proportion of Epocrates subscription revenue, yet were previously managed in an entirely separate business process from credit card and invoiced subscription sales.

Having out-of-the-box support for IAP was crucial for Athenahealth, with the ability to collect app store data automatically and reconcile it against other payment processes. As a result, business users can now expect to receive a single consolidated report of their subscription business—regardless of payment model.

Growing the future of Athenahealth’s business

Acquiring and converting more new subscribers

Over the past two decades, Athenahealth has built an ever-greater understanding of Epocrates users and how to connect with them effectively. This allows the company to attract new physicians with effective marketing campaigns, convert free users to subscribers, while also rewarding and retaining existing subscribers.

Driving a wide variety of customer acquisition campaigns directly from the subscription platform is essential to support models like - introductory offers, honored guests, trial periods, short coupon codes, gifting, conference and trade show trial codes.

The company wanted to be innovative with these incentives, but found it was being held back by the legacy in-house platform. A lack of agility and flexibility meant campaigns were hard to set up and were taking too long to reach market. A new, more flexible approach was needed, where new subscription models and campaigns could be set up as fast as possible—where the only limit was the imagination of marketers.

Moving to Vindicia Subscribe in the cloud

After an in-depth review of the market, weighing up options for subscription management platforms and stepping up its in-house development, Athenahealth opted for Vindicia Subscribe to support the next phase of its business. With the health platform’s desire to become a full software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, it made sense to choose a SaaS subscription platform.

Not only did this enable a very rapid 90-day implementation plan, but it ensured that a wide range of tools to accelerate the company’s subscription business and support the entire subscription lifecycle would be available out of the gate. With the tools to reach more doctors than ever before, Athenahealth is prescribing a healthy future for the next 20 years of Epocrates.