The European digital health market is growing and, at the same time, concentrating: capital goes to fewer and larger companies, and underneath sits a long tail of small suppliers. We are one of them.
That creates a risk that rarely appears in a specification and belongs entirely to the institution: the equipment stays, the supplier may not.
Better to discuss it head on than to hope nobody asks.
Why this differs from other sectors
If a chair supplier closes, the chairs remain chairs. In software and connected equipment, a product can stop working without anyone touching it: a licence that expires, a server that shuts down, an app store that stops serving the app.
The right question is not "are you solid?" — everyone says yes. It is:
What keeps working on the day you disappear?
The seven questions
They apply to any small health technology supplier:
- Does the product work without your servers? If the answer is no, you are buying a subscription to a service, not equipment.
- Does it need internet for normal use?
- If the company disappears, what exactly stops working, and when?
- Is data exportable in an open format, without asking you for anything?
- Who can repair or replace the hardware other than you?
- What does the contract provide for on termination, insolvency or acquisition?
- How many people can keep this running? If it is one, it is a person, not a company.
Our answers, including the ones that do not favour us
What keeps working without us:
- Playback of already installed content. The scenarios sit on the device and run without internet. A headset with the library installed keeps running sessions.
- Control from the browser, because it runs on the institution's local network, not our cloud.
- The hardware. The equipment is commercial and unmodified by us; it is not bricked.
What stops working:
- New content. The catalogue is generated from our backoffice. Without us, the library freezes at whatever is installed.
- Updates to the application, fixes and new features.
- Support, training and replacement of faulty equipment under contract.
- Modules in development, which are already outside the medical device registration and should not weigh in a purchase decision.
Plainly: sessions continue, evolution stops. That is a better answer than many products that need a cloud to function at all, and a worse one than "nothing changes" — which would not be true.
What an institution can require by contract
None of this is exotic and most suppliers accept it, if asked:
- Data export in an open format, on request and at no cost.
- Notice period on discontinuation of service.
- A continuity clause guaranteeing continued use of what is installed.
- Operating documentation sufficient for someone else to understand the system.
If a supplier refuses the first one, that is a signal in itself.
The other side, which is also honest
Large companies discontinue products just as readily — only without warning and with nobody to talk to. "Buy from the biggest" reduces insolvency risk and increases irrelevance risk: a small product inside a large company is the first thing cut in a reorganisation.
What genuinely reduces risk is not supplier size. It is the architecture — does it work without them? — and the contract.
In short
- The equipment stays, the supplier may not, and the risk is the institution's.
- The question is what keeps working, not whether the supplier is solid.
- With us: sessions continue (installed content, local network, commercial hardware) and evolution stops (new content, updates, support).
- Require data export and a continuity clause. Whoever refuses is answering you.
- Buying from the biggest trades one risk for another, it does not remove it.