Startups

A collection of 11  Posts

Entrepreneurs must integrate mission-driven strategic investors

Last week I wrote about how federated groups of investors help de-risk innovations in the Venture Development Lifecycle (VDLC). Yesterday I elaborated on how entrepreneurs can understand risk through various funding cycles. One of the most important investors we didn’t talk about in the VDLC was the strategic investor (what I like to call the mission-driven investor) . Mission-driven strategics view risk differently and entrepreneurs should create investor journey maps to take them into account.

The folks from HP Matter digital magazine wanted to know where I thought digital health startups, product innovators, and venture capital investors should be pointing their attention in 2015. These are some of my technology and healthcare predictions: CMS’s request for information (RFI) on new primary care models bears innovative fruit. Interoperability will move beyond talk and into sustainable business models and real technology. The healthcare ecosystem should be able to create lasting patient benefits.

John Lynn, prolific blogger and health IT media magnate, and I are teaming up again for the second year to produce and deliver a marketing conference focused on helping digital health, health IT, and medical device innovators. We’re going to be providing actionable advice and specific techniques you can use to cut through the noise when trying to market healthcare and medical tech products to physicians, hospitals, health systems, ACOs, patients, and similar customers.

Our vision of providing a series of packed one day events focused on practical, relevant, and actionable health IT advice were very well received in Houston, NYC, and Santa Monica earlier this year. Our next event is in Chicago and we’re going to continue to eschew canned PowerPoint decks which limit conversations and instead deliver on the implications of major trends and operationalizable advice about where to successfully apply IT in healthcare settings.

I’ve been looking at hospital supply chain automation and the IT surrounding it for a number of years now. Starting with Cardinal Health but then moving on to help a number of other vendors in the space, I’ve felt that there’s not been enough next-generation tech being applied to the low margin, high volume business of hospital supply management. Hospitals often spend tens of millions of dollars on EHRs and other IT systems that have little direct cost reduction capability but they ignore, often at their peril, supply management systems that can save immediate dollars.

John Lynn, prolific blogger and health IT media magnate, and I are teaming up to produce and deliver the world’s first marketing conference focused on helping innovators cut through the noise when trying to market their healthcare and medical tech products to physicians, hospitals, and similar customers. Called The Healthcare IT Marketing Conference, it will cover very important subjects by some of the world’s best experts on those topics. Learn how to align the Payers, Beneficiaries, and Users (PBU) of your Health IT or MedTech product

_I’m a geek and proud of it — I love building software, launching new products, and am a fan of others that do it well. Recently I ran across the Berlin-based team from kenHub, a site focused on teaching anatomy online and helping medical students prepare for tests. I reached out to the team to ask them how they were differentiating themselves from the many other solutions available they said their goal was to simplify the process of learning using new didactic concepts to focus on memorizing and gamification elements to make it fun and engaging.

A frequent question I am asked by startups and their software focused leadership teams is, “how do we generate sales and what is the appropriate process to follow in creating our sales expectations.” My friend Steve Carbonara has been selling software to healthcare enterprises for years so I asked him to write a companion to his piece on_ __selling to hospitals. Steve is currently the Chief Sales Officer at Cohealo, Inc.

Last week the Greater Chicago Chapter of HIMSS invited me to participate in their healthcare technology webinar series. I covered the topic “What’s Next for Healthcare Information Technology Innovation?” and the screencast with audio has been posted here. I covered numerous topics that are helpful for entrepreneurs and engineers that want to create innovative healthcare technology.

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