• Get the attention of payers of all sizes and types and inform them about your service;
• Give payers a viable way to implement your service - within the context of their overall cost containment program;
• Give payers a way to try out your service that is practical for both parties, without making a major up-front commitment of resources;
• Assure that you can negotiate a competitive but reasonable price for your service;
• Conduct operations for each customer with high quality and low cost;
• Build and grow a strong relationship with your customer over time.                                                                               

• Compete in an open market, and on a level playing field!
• Have your services out in front of and accessible by payers;
• Establish a direct relationship with your partners from the beginning - including negotiating business terms - and grow the relationship through attentive account management and excellent operational support;
• Enable your payer prospect to implement your service without significant effort on their part to modify their billflow to accommodate you;
• Take advantage of changing market and legislative conditions to implement multiple payers quickly;
• Make sure you always have available high quality implementation resources to begin custom implementations with little lead time;
• Keep operations simple and cost low while managing and supporting a large number of payers - each of which needs custom formats, schedules, transports and transaction codes - without putting an impossible burden on your IT department.
• Be able to introduce new service options and even brand new services with little or no concern about distribution and implementation.

• Internally develop point-to-point transaction interfaces, plus custom setup to handle the management and support of multiple payers;
• Audition to become a vendor partner of one or more major intermiediaries that offer one-stop-shopping and a single connection to their payer market,  while giving up relationships and a substantial portion of revenue in return;

OR

• Join the Dr Bill Exchange community and remove the technology and access constraints while establishing your own customer relationships and terms.

 Note that none of these alternatives are exclusive with the other.  So how do these alternatives compare?

It's not really surprising that Dr Bill Exchange scores well -- it was designed to perform exactly these functions and nothing else.  With its one-connection-to-reach-all-members design and neutral third party business model, it is the perfect answer to building an open market solution. 

But be aware that the Exchange does change the payer market.  Payers are no longer tied to a single proprietary solution.  This means they will use many more services than in the past. The most attractive vendors become those who are willing to work within the payer’s new framework, and those willing to provide services that are part of many payers’ programs rather than fight for a small and decreasing number of “winner takes all” programs.  This new framework will produce many more payer-vendor relationships and re-pricing opportunities than in the past – yet at lower cost and complexity.  We see this already with our current customers.  There will be many winners in the new model.