Congratulations to anyone who owned shares of Bridgeline Digital Inc. (NASDAQ:BLIN) before today. You're now up 35% for the day so far, and still counting. The big pop from BLIN stemmed from the announcement that it scored a pretty significant deal with an organization consisting of nearly 4000 dentists and doctors. The terms of the deal are simple enough... Bridgeline Digital will host and service websites for the practitioners in the group for a period of three years, and in return, BLIN will receive $7 million.
It's yet another case of technology converging with healthcare, though truth be told, the Bridgeline only scratches the surface of how the digital world and the patient-care world can unite to create something greater than the sum of its parts. A little company called CollabRx Inc. (NASDAQ:CLRX) is taking it up a notch - maybe two notches - to turn the web into a guidance portal for oncologists seeking new and better treatment options for cancer patients. Among these options are drug trials that a caregiver may not even be aware of, were it not for this highly-specialized site CLRX has designed.
A comparison to WebMD Health Corp. (NASDAQ:WBMD) is conjured up almost immediately, but it's not a comparison an investor or patient would want to make. WBMD is primarily aimed at individuals who don't have a medical background, and are looking more for tips than for science. The CollabRx site is exclusively built for doctors (oncologists in particular) and diagnostic laboratories that need detailed information parsed out of a sea of data that could be overwhelming were it not curated and focused. Indeed, unlike WebMD or the kind of websites that Bridgeline Digital is going to provide for its new client, the information that's going to be found via CollabRx may be little more than gibberish to a layperson, but it will be highly instructive to doctors and caregivers.
That being said, even a detailed description of what the CollabRx application does still doesn't do it justice, as there's no frame of reference for investors to use as a baseline. To that end, only a snapshot of what the site does will adequately explain the importance of this tool to doctors.
The image immediately below is of the landing page specifically for doctors caring for lung cancer patients. By filling in the appropriate details, that doctor is taken to a new page that looks like the lower of the two images below. It's got treatment options, descriptions of appropriate therapies, and perhaps most important, more information about clinical trials that may well be the only viable hope for a particular cancer patient.
The timing for such a service has never been better either. The advent of molecular-level screening has allowed doctors to know more about a patient's cancer than even before. In fact, the amount of diagnostic data that has stemmed from genetic-based testing has reached overwhelming proportions, so much so that even the most astute of oncologists can't keep up with the variants, or with drug trials designed to treat certain variations of cancers. This tool/site finds those trials and explains all the options to a doctor that, frighteningly enough, he or she may not have even known about.
Almost needless to say (again), comparing CollabRx to what WebMD does or what Bridgeline Digital will be doing soon isn't even close to being a relevant comparison. There's nothing else out there like it. That's why Tagliach Brothers believes CLRX could drive $2.6 million in revenue in 2016, and by 2020, the annual top line could reach $16.5 million. Not bad for a $6.2 million organization that only finalized the first of its cancer information portals last quarter.
For more on CollabRx, visit its corporate website here. Or, you can read the SCN research report here, or the SCN recommendation here.
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