Health View Bioanalytic Limited: Generating Impact from Research

Benny Chung-Ying Zee was a professor at a prestigious university in Hong Kong and founder of Health View Bioanalytic Limited (Health View). Health View offered fast, inexpensive, non-invasive assessments of the risk of stroke and Alzheimer’s disease by using artificial intelligence and automatic retinal image analysis (ARIA) of pictures of patients’ retinas using fundus cameras. While Health View was breaking even, Zee realized that it was not yet a success. Thus, Zee was considering how to scale up the company to realize the impact of its technology. Zee had to assess the current business model—its value proposition, target market, sales channels, and strategic partners—and determine how he could scale up and redirect Health View.

This case can be used in senior undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on for-profit and social entrepreneurship. Students should have taken basic business courses—accounting, finance, management, marketing—and be familiar with analyzing the business model of a start-up. The major objective of the case is to allow students to analyze alternative models for delivering innovative health risk assessments. The case provides an example of how artificial intelligence is impacting the health care industry. It allows students to consider social entrepreneurship versus for-profit entrepreneurship, and adds another dimension to the “rich versus king” dilemma. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:<ul><li>Assess business-to-business relationships for a customer-centric health service.</li><li>Understand the importance of turning technology into useful applications to create value for customers.</li><li>Appreciate one use of AI in diagnostics.</li><li>Understand the commonalities and differences between social enterprises and for-profit enterprises.</li><li>Analyze the “rich versus king” trade-off in a social enterprise setting.</li><li>Consider the alternatives for scaling up, including positioning as social enterprise versus for-profit venture, selling the company, seeking different social financing models, franchising, pursuing distributorships, and pursuing partnerships.</li></ul>

• health care
• artificial intelligence
• scale up