I just read an extremely interesting article in last month's Wired magazine, "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business."  (Yes, I am behind on my reading.) I started to think about how I could apply it to my work and projects.  We offer a free consumer health library and a free medication library for anyone to use.  I would be against any attempt to charge a subscription fee to get to those services.  When I was in graduate school I remember discussing the subscription model on the Internet as a business model that doesn't work.  I've seen that most organizations (especially newspapers) have tried this model and have moved to free online access to archives.

We offer these applications (and many others as part of the free myCommunity membership) as a service to our patients and hope that users who are not currently patients will consider these services when selecting a health care provider.  But these services are available to people outside of the Indianapolis area who may never be able to use our hospitals.  They are still allowed and encouraged to use our site. 

In addition some applications like health information are becoming the standard for health care providers like ATMs are now a standard for banks to offer.  By paying attention to these services the health care organization can increase their reputation and trustworthiness, and secure a patient's attention.  Just like Chris Anderson writes:

"The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both."

We provide free services but also use free services.  We use Google Analytics as another source for web statistics, we use Feedburner to help manage our RSS feeds and we use Google Maps in our Find a Doctor application.  There is tons of free services available we could use but have chosen not to because they can be overwhelming to manage and get value from.

It makes me wonder what else we could offer for free that would return value through other avenues.

I love reading Wired for articles like this.  I read about The Long Tail some time before it became popular in this magazine.  Who knows, maybe this will be the next big idea?