Who wants to waste less time?

The best way to efficiently filter information is to channel it.

The critical difference of the healthica marketplace is the ability to prescreen information, so that you receive new items that are already tagged to be in your areas of interest. Allow us to explain.

We define a channel with three components: the manufacturer, the modality, and the area of interest. The first two are pretty straightforward — think Siemens Medical Systems (manufacturer), and MRI (modality). The last part is just a bit more complex.

Your channels are matched to your interests. If you want to buy, you need to see listings. If you want to sell, you need to see requests. (Maybe both?) But we support four types in each category: equipment sales, parts sales, service sales, and other for a total of eight options. This is a channel.

Once you set up a channel, here's what happens. Let's say you “subscribed to the Siemens Medical Systems:MRI channel with the options show buyers for parts and show sellers for parts, and the preference for email:

• Someone else (any other user on healthica) logs in and posts a request for Siemens MRI parts.
• The moment they post the request, healthica sends you an email with all the details of the request*, and you can decide if you are interested. Let's assume you have the part being requested.
• You log into healthica to get the contact information*, and you proceed to deal direct with the person who made the request.

What's the upside here?

Glad you asked. The upsides (there are several) are as follows:

• You can filter the entire flow of requests we process, and only see things in the areas (channels) of interest to you. Furthermore, you can decide if you are even interested in trying to make a deal, because the only thing you don't already know at this point is who made the request.
• You never have to upload anything (though you probably should). This is a fellow user telling you exactly what they want, so the question is “do you have it?”
• The buyer here has the advantage of being able to reach every subscriber to the channel they indicated when they made the request — without knowing them. Your need propogates to every serious seller automatically, and you don't have to make phone calls, look up sites, etc.
• The seller can prefilter whether they are interested at all, and then screen the contact to make sure this is a party they might want to deal with. No uncomfortable conversations required. The leads come to the seller, and the seller gets in touch directly if they are interested.

“Set it and forget it”

Generally, setting your channels is a one-time event, and once you are done, the marketplace traffic will flow to your email and/or SMS automatically. Sellers receive pre-filtered leads from active buyers, and active buyers receive pre-filtered notices of new items available for sale. It's all automatic and we spend much less time searching for things that come to us automatically.