5 Golden Nuggets of Wisdom from the Health Innovators Video Podcast

Sometimes thinking about the past can be heavy.

So, how about we lighten the load? 

As we wrap up the year, I want to share and unpack five gold nuggets of wisdom from my Health Innovators video podcast, where I chat with healthcare entrepreneurs and business leaders who are at the forefront of innovation.

So let’s get into it! 

Remain agile

This year has brought a lot of change. 

The COVID pandemic brought telehealth and telemedicine to the forefront, making healthcare more accessible for some and less accessible for others. Many healthcare providers quickly embraced virtual appointments, because as the saying goes — necessity is the mother of invention.

Telehealth is here to stay but more change is coming in 2023. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

One of my guests on the show is the Dean of Cambridge Judge Business School and bestselling author, Mauro Guillén. He laid out the changes and trends that are destined to disrupt your business and create new opportunities. 

“When so many things are changing, what you need to do is be like a surfer and catch the biggest wave you can imagine.” 

If you want to know what those big waves are, I highly recommend reading his book 2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything. You can also check out our conversation on his visionary book and how to be an expert surfer in your business. 

Think about the patient and/or caregiver

Frequent guest of the podcast, Dr. Joseph Kvedar is a professor, author, editor, advisor, and telehealth evangelist. Earlier this year, he came on the show to talk about what’s going on with digital healthcare. 

It’s not about just the latest and greatest tech, it’s who that tech is for.

“When thinking about digital healthcare, we tend to view solutions through the lens of either a health system executive or a health provider. What we need to do is view it through the lens of the patient or the caregiver.”

Conventional wisdom in healthcare leaves us about a decade behind everywhere else. So consider where you can get easier buy-in from customers while centering patients and caregivers with your health tech.

You can’t sell to everybody

Here I come, on my soapbox about who to sell to and who not to sell to!

If you're a healthcare innovator — you’re a pioneer, a rebel, a change agent. This means most people are not going to be interested in what you’re selling. They’re not ready for you…yet!

Who is ready for you right now are your fellow innovators and the early adopters, the ones who are ready to try out the latest tech and leapfrog the competition.

I’m not the only one preaching the good news of market segmentation and the power of focusing on the first 16% of the market (and when I say most people aren’t ready for your innovation, I do mean 84% of people are not ready to purchase in a new market). 

Market strategist Warren Schirtzinger specializes in technology adoption life cycles and navigating the chasm between the 16% who are ready and the 84% who are not. 

I’m such a fan of Warren and his vision for marketing innovations, he was on my podcast twice this year. 

Here’s what he had to say about who to sell to as an innovator: 

“You need to find innovators first. They will take your solution out into the broader market. But if you go straight to the mainstream, that’s when you fail.”

Don’t let your passion spin your wheels and get you stuck in a market that can’t appreciate what you’re bringing to the table. Instead, find people who share your passion and they’ll share it with their friends and they’ll share it with their friends and before you know it, you’ll have that BIG MONEY, BABY!

Ask the right questions

You may be just beginning your commercialization journey or years into it. It takes time, I know. In addition to selling to the right people, you also need to make sure that people want what you are offering to begin with.

This seems obvious, but the #1 reason why an innovation fails is there is no market need.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Dr. Lloyd Humphrey about commercialization pitfalls. He's the Managing Director at ORCHA, a company that assesses and distributes quality assured digital health solutions.

One of the pitfalls we discussed is assuming you know what your customers need, meaning you start with the answer instead of the right question.

“Sometimes we start with the answer, because we assume what the question is. And so often, that's the case, or we're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. So it's really important that you unpack…why you're doing what you're doing in that way.” 

And yes, you probably know Simon Sinek and his books Start Your Why and Find Your Why. The same wisdom applies. You just have to remember that this isn’t about you! (Remember what Warren and Dr. Kvedar said! Scroll up if you forgot!)

Female health deserves more focus

Let me put it bluntly for you: unless your health tech is designed solely for men, your solution might be ineffective with a large group of your target customers — women. 

And that is simply unacceptable in 2023! Let’s leave focusing on the reference man for R&D behind and get more inclusive.

Danika Kelly, CEO and co-founder of My Normative, has been a guest on my podcast twice this year. One episode, that was published yesterday, was a panel discussion with other rockstar women in health where we discussed tech-enabled personalized models of care.

On her solo episode, we talked about digital health and women and how Danika and her team are helping to bridge major data gaps in sex and gender. You might be surprised to know that:

“The number one reason why a pharmaceutical intervention is pulled off the market is once it's in [the] market, it fails on female bodies.”

How is this happening? Because health tech is built on the model body and that’s not female. Instead, it's based on “the reference man.”

Think about this for a minute. We just talked about patients and caregivers still being overlooked. And now we’re learning that females and minorities are also underrepresented.

If we want to truly transform healthcare and get our innovations in the hands of the people who need them most, we need to heed this wisdom and reevaluate our commercial decisions in 2024.