I'm under the impression that these guys are in the pharma space because that is where the money is for a service provider. Pharma underwrites a lot of this stu

I'm under the impression that these guys are in the pharma space because that is where the money is for a service provider. Pharma underwrites a lot of this stuff. Once you have a toehold in the larger health care space you can branch out and expand to other opportunities. If I were to approach healthcare on the whole I could think of worse places in the pipeline to start than big pharma. There is a difference between bioinformatics such as genetic sequencing and its better half, analysis, and medical /clinical/research informatics. Imho, the current ability to sequence vast amounts of dna far outstrips our ability to analyze it. Better, quicker analysis will come in the form of better algorithms and through machine learning/data mining. Medical informatics, the practice of managing patient information is a separate problem. Here the problem is connecting different systems that were not meant to be connected when designed, and great tools for parsing and presenting that data by non-programmers. I'm working with tools like Amalga and RedCap right now which each play in their own space but do provide a service. They could both be... better. The field is wide open for disruption. Programmer time is the limiting resource factor in making better things happen for a lot of different institutions. The other major limiting factor is simply institutional politics. No amount of silicon valley magic will make that go away.