Why You Need A Frontline Clinical Team to Build a Health Startup
Accurate information and seamless communication are key.
For years, top minds in healthcare have worked toward more cost-effective, convenient, and accessible delivery models. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated that shift. As government and healthcare establishment entities lagged, care delivery rapidly transitioned away from high-cost physical venues like hospitals and clinics, to more flexible and affordable virtual settings.
Most of these changes will outlast the pandemic. As CMS Administrator Seema Verma told the Wall Street Journal, “I think the genie’s out of the bottle on this one.”
Healthcare is evolving, and therefore, health startups have risen to meet this moment. Virtual technology’s proliferating within the healthcare space, disrupting longstanding delivery systems and processes. Several tech firms have developed, and are developing, solutions that leverage AI and natural language processing to streamline healthcare touchpoints and boost provider productivity. While exciting, Silicon Valley is no substitute for clinical expertise.
Frontline providers have incredible insight into patient and practitioner needs. They can far more quickly identify the challenges that patients face and involving them in the solution-finding process is key.
Health startups depend on real-life clinicians and data to properly “train” their algorithms. Tech companies enlist the assistance of clinicians and patients to ensure they meet stakeholders’ goals and needs, yet it’s vital to keep the focus squarely where it belongs: delivering higher quality care to patients. Health startups, if not founded by clinical teams, must at the very least center them in their endeavors. If technology’s the engine driving improved care, a frontline clinical team acts as steering wheel.
When startups craft diagnostics, therapies, prevention and administrative applications without first consulting or embedded physicians in the creation process, they ultimately fail to work within the realities and constraints of the health environment. Here at Inflect Health, as a physician-owned and -led entity, we embody a human-centric approach, rooted in addressing gaps we witness first-hand. Knowing what we should do defines what we seek to do, and therefore what we can do.
“When you have healthcare providers who are on the front lines seeing patients, they understand the challenges that the patients face. They also inherently understand the challenges that they themselves face in bringing effective quality care delivery,” says Bobbie Kumar M.D., Vituity’s Director of Clinical Transformation.
“Our concerns that we have when we’re practicing clinical medicine is something that you won’t see in the boardroom or working with administration,” Kumar continues. “Having that experience really allows you to hone in on what is needed. The solutions can be tested rapidly, and I believe that is how we can make healthcare innovation more successful.”
Frontline clinical teams possess the breadth and depth of experience to deliver key coordinated insights to disruption-minded startups. They also pressure-test the relational, community-based care that success in the health space demands. Yes, clinicians will need to learn how to operate new emerging technologies (or at least understand them) and virtual customer service skills, yet within the startup ecosystem, it remains imperative to deliver exactly which technologies yield the greatest benefit.
“The first thing you think about as a founder is product-market fit,” says Inflect Health advisor and Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar. “I think if I had a wish list or for my startup, it’d be someone able to partner with us and help get market-fit capabilities in terms of experimentation and market access. This makes it very, very potent and powerful.” A frontline clinical team acts as product tester, target market, strategic consultant and innovation partner.
Healthcare is a multi-headed hydra. Patients, physicians, hospitals, insurers, regulators, innovators and device operators all play important and invariably intersecting roles. STAT News suggests startups need a physician “who can navigate the nuances of the medical landscape. One with an innovative mindset who can explain how the new product will function in the system, or touch a patient’s life, or integrate into a doctor’s day.” Such intimate knowledge is crucial, and often the final piece of a multi-dimensional puzzle.
Iana Dimkova, VC investor and Strategic Advisor, expresses that knowledge as a key element that differentiates our work.“[With] their breadth of healthcare experience, and strategic ties to one of the largest clinician networks in the country, the team is uniquely positioned to support early stage healthcare companies, through both the ability to make equity investments, and also through and flexibility to provide strategic guidance and resources to enable company scaling efforts.”
A frontline clinical team in a startup setting provides both insight and empathy. Clinicians and physicians don’t just know what they need to improve patient outcomes, they care a great deal about doing so. Their lived experience creates a passionate desire for finding ways to satisfy regulatory requirements and clear checkpoints, eliminate silos and bottlenecks, and ultimately make the lives of their peers easier and their patients longer.
