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.