The hard truth
What is the future of healthcare? We all know what it should be like: affordable, accessible, transparent and focused on proactive care instead of reactive care. The promise that technology would disrupt this industry has been brought up infinite times and, while there are certainly tremendous strides with “eHealth” and Digital Health initiatives across the world, we are still pretty far away from our nirvana state.
Technology trends supporting the global health agenda are also clear. Entrepreneurs across the world are taking notes and driving the much-needed innovation into the marketplace with solutions that include social discovery, self-diagnoses, quantified-self, clinical and actionable decision support tools. The trick for all of these innovations to succeed is to make them sustainable, on the one hand by proving that preventative measures yield hard outcomes and on the other by finding the right balance between profits and social good. Both factors ultimately result in one thing: providing an improved experience for the patient.
Innovation -no matter how one defines it- is hard. It is hard in any industry, but especially in healthcare. I recently attended a health technology event where I got to participate in a session that focused on health innovation. We broke up into pairs and picked either a fictional product or a real product based on your peer’s experience. The exercise, while simple, was very eye opening for many. Result: there is a tremendous amount of stakeholders involved in the healthcare value chain. No matter which product you choose, many, if not all of these entities need to be convinced of your solution. As an example: for any new solution that targets epilepsy, 32+ stakeholders were mapped out. This is even more difficult when you are an intraprenuer: you first need to sell an idea to internal stakeholders before even attempting to go out to the market.
Building a startup takes persistence, hard work, vision, drive and execution, but it also takes early adopters to help these transformers succeed. It is vital to have someone to help in the refinement of products and business models. While there are many sustainable small businesses that could be born, all of these ultimately depend on who pays their bills. This is the hard but known truth!
I recently co-founded Q!, a startup in social intelligence space. While we have recently launched, the business model discussion have been there from the very first brainstorming sesssions — and there are many. Having said that, there are two stakeholders that we need to convince initially: Apple to approve our app (DONE), and the consumer to download our app for FREE (IN PROGRESS). Eventually, we will add few more stakeholders who will be buyers of the service, but those become vertical B2B clients. Oversimplified? Yes, but this all showcases the point I will make next.
Let’s contrast the above paragraph to any healthcare related startup. Whether you are building an app for patients and physicians, or getting ready to launch clinical analytics software to embed into existing hospital management platforms, you have a large task ahead of you. In either case, you will need to map out your detailed value proposition for not only your direct buyer, but all the other stakeholders involved: regulators, lobby groups, physicians, nurses, chief medical officers, patient groups, pharma, insurance companies… the list keeps going and growing. Once you have the idea down and a prototype, don’t rush to the sales pitches; spend some time working on ways to convince all of the above entities that your solution will provide a unique proposition for them or at least not interfere with their existing agendas.
What if you are a corporate entity that is trying to innovate inside the four walls? I urge you to work with the healthcare transformers -as StartupHealth calls them- and help them refine their models for the future of our health!