In healthcare, attention is a scarce resource.
If you’re selling a healthcare app in Canada, you’ll face difficulties getting noticed because health networks are under tremendous strain and data lives in silos.
If you’re selling a healthcare app in the United States, you’ll face an uphill battle accessing decision makers. Health networks are massive, providers are aplenty, and the interface between insurance companies and patients is a maze not for the faint of heart.
But does that mean bringing innovation to hospitals as a third-party vendor is a lost cause? Not by a long shot.
Hospitals need external vendors to help them innovate. Healthcare providers are focused on delivering the best health outcomes for their patients, and that often means embracing new technology … but only after they see sufficient data to prove potential impact.
And this is why health tech companies are often staring down the barrel of a chicken-or-the-egg situation: they need to test their apps within a hospital setting, but hospitals need data to support a use case before adoption.
So what’s a healthcare app to do?
John Shahidi, former director of business strategy at BlueDot and partner at Parkdale Ventures, has been selling healthcare technology to hospitals for several years.
Keep reading to find out more about John’s step-by-step process for developing relationships with hospital staff, building your reputation, and closing your first big deal.
Step 1: Understand hospital metrics.
Healthcare apps face a two-pronged challenge when they’re attempting to prove their worth to a hospital:
- Clinical outcomes: how physicians will improve health outcomes for their patients at a faster rate
- Population health outcomes: how leadership can demonstrate better health outcomes at a population level within their organization
- Readmission and re-infection rates
- Mortality rate
- Bed occupancy
- Average length of stay
- ER wait times
- Hospital incidents: hospital-acquired infections, etc.
- Physician-specific metrics: revenue generated, patients seen per day, average patient costs per day
- Operating margins
- What does “impact” look like for my healthcare partner?
- How will I know if my solution is delivering an impactful outcome?
- Which features of my app are set up to deliver an impactful outcome?
- How will I know if I’m not affecting patient outcomes?
- How many touchpoints is my healthcare partner willing to have during the course of the pilot?
- What is my plan to pivot with this healthcare partner if I need to?
- What are the ideal next steps after the pilot is over?
- Open lines of communication between your pilot team and developers
- A commitment to bias toward action
- The human resources required to iterate on key features
- Team alignment on the importance of acting quickly
- Team alignment on what’s considered impactful
- Engage your highest level executive for CIO outreach. Your organization will need to reach out from a seniority level that is commensurate to the person at the hospital.
- Package your pilot results into a compelling, data-driven story. Include pilot partner logos and references to published studies. Ensure your proposal is visually compelling, professionally designed, and gets to the point quickly about how your solution improves the metrics hospitals care about.
- Anticipate questions about cybersecurity and compliance. CIOs care about data custody almost as much as they care about metrics. Watch our on-demand HIPAA 101 webinar to learn more about the ins and out of data privacy and how to ensure your healthcare app is handling personal health information (PHI) in a manner that’s compliant.
To learn how MedStack can help, book a demo today.