The top two reasons why it is so hard to find the right market for your health tech product.
"It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me." -T. Swift and the busy clinician.
There are many really interesting technology options out there for medical groups and providers. The traditional medical group market is the most stable source of patients and… they have never been harder to interact with.
We all hear about AI based documentation, interoperability tools, patient monitoring, and many other advancements that can change how we do healthcare. The benefits of these products seem great, but they have to be communicated to a gatekeeper. This person is usually a busy provider who is also in charge of quality and provider wellbeing. Lets just say that things…. can… stall.
It doesn’t matter the size of the company selling. In my experience, the tiny startup and the billion dollar behemoth both have the same problems.
The inability to communicate to the provider why they should interrupt their current system for an ROI that you cannot define or quantify.
The inability to navigate a stressed staffing model and IT department.
Everything has changed in the last year. In 2022, healthcare was coming off of generous covid funds and had yet to see inflationary pressures from rising wages and flat reimbursements. Healthcare is struggling right now. Look at the headlines …(see links below).
Staffing levels are many times lower than usual and that stresses the system. Clinicians do not have the bandwidth to spend time integrating a product that “has an unknown ROI” or a product that “is a quick API connection to your EHR.”
They might have already handed off a pilot of a product to their IT team that went awry and took way too much time and resources… and this makes them reluctant to disrupt the status quo. Companies will have larger hurdles to jump for the next few years when selling into medial groups.
What are the solutions?
There is not one easy and simple solution, but lets talk about two potential solutions.
Create more physician champions. There are very few “peer to peer” voices out there speaking the language of the clinician that they can trust. They need people like them, who understand the problem, and have personal experience with the technology.
For example, I had an interaction with a large company who gave us a physician expert who said on the webinar “I don’t use this in my practice… its not ready for my specialty yet”
That is hard to recover from.
Get someone who uses the product and has trained their staff to use it. They are gold.
Make the integration easy and make our IT department love you. We cannot continue to work with a company that has a product that is just simple step in the right direction. If your problem is solved by existing technology with fine performance and your product takes 100 hours of IT time and testing to integrate… like the kids say “Hard pass.”
Did I miss anything?
Associated articles/ reading:
Great article from Prova Health on "The rising demand of evidence in digital health"
”US hospitals are likely to face billions of dollars in losses…”
Forbes: "Under Financial Pressure, How Are Health Systems Prioritizing Digital Health Investments?"