The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a digital health revolution in the healthcare space, providing a convenient and safe way for patients to receive care outside of the four walls of the hospital or clinic. In droves, nonprofit and for-profit health systems invested in digital health strategies to help increase hospital capacity, divert from the crowded emergency department, ease staff burden, and enable providers to care for their patients from afar. Beyond COVID-19 response, these strategies have helped healthcare entities deliver comprehensive care, increase access, reduce costs, and improve patient convenience.

By David Berger, MD

In this episode on helping digital startups sell their solutions, I want to focus on the issue of implementation. It is certainly important to have a wiz bang digital solution. Equally important is how to implement the solution and manage the changes it causes. All startups should understand the concerns the hospital C-suite has around the implementation process. Specifically, the startup must be prepared to answer the following:

By David Berger, MD

In my last blog post I discussed the challenges digital health startups face when trying to sell to hospitals and health systems.  In this post I suggest some ways to overcome the hurdles and succeed in building a client base. 

Startups need to be realistic about where they are in their product life cycle.  As I mentioned previously, hospitals are risk adverse with tight budgets.  …

By David Berger

The pathway to success for digital health startups is challenging. Hospitals are often looked at as the point of entry for digital startups. Trying to work with large hospitals can pose challenges for early stage start-ups for several reasons:

1) Hospitals often are a part of larger systems. As a result, there are multiple layers to the approval process with multiple decision makers prolonging the sales cycle. In my experience as COO of an academic medical center the time from initial interest to contract can exceed two years. Furthermore, complex deployment processes add to the timeline for pilot implementation.