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Selling into the health-care market doesn't have to be as complicated as dealing with your health insurance company. Solution providers can turn to distributor Avnet's HealthPath program to help them navigate the vertical and capture a bigger chunk of the $40 billion market.

Since the program's inception in March of last year, Avnet said it has seen sales of health-care technology solutions rise by more than 40 percent, and solution providers say that the program's HealthPath University is making them more effective when courting customers.

So far, the Phoenix-based distributor has held eight HealthPath University seminars around the U.S., and more are planned. The three-day course teaches solution providers how hospitals run, who the key decision makers are in different departments in the hospital, and how to approach those decision makers by addressing both business and patient-care problems.

"Our goal when we created the practice was to try to find a way to find double-digit growth for Avnet and its partners. Obviously when we looked at the market, we could figure out where the spend was coming from—health care jumped out," said Tony Vottima, vice president of business development at Avnet Technology Solutions.

"This is one of those verticals where almost all of it is midmarket, with the exception of maybe 200 or 250 hospitals which, from a category perspective, we could call enterprise accounts," he said.

While big university hospitals and clinics are more likely to have CIOs and IT plans, midmarket hospitals are more likely to go through solution providers. "The primary goal of a hospital is around taking care of patients, and the folks you're talking to are doctors focused on the patients, not necessarily around profits or making money. You have to understand what that doctor or what that executive inside a hospital is actually thinking about," said Vottima.

"It's a unique market in that they really haven't spent a lot of money on technology in the last 10 years," he added. "It is very much a greenfield opportunity for them, but they need to know what the priorities of the hospital are."

That's where HealthPath University comes in, said Vottima.

So far more than 50 solution providers have sent more than 100 students to the course, and Avnet is also instituting an internship program where resellers actually spend time in hospitals to get a feel for who does what and how the organization is structured. The five-day program starts in admissions and takes solution providers through different departments to get hands-on experience with the various microcosms that make up the hospital.

"We're working with some local hospitals and we're trying to get this through the partners that come through this will probably have the best education on how to sell to hospitals short of what you'd have from going through medical school," said Vottima.

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