You’re a healthcare tech start-up trying to get off the ground. Investors like your technology, and they see the power of the masses of data you will gather to change health outcomes. But they’re scared of the entropy in today’s healthcare system—the uncertainty, the conflicting aims, and the sheer complexity of trying to bring rationality to a dauntingly complex economy.

So you’re stuck. Maybe they passed on you, or told you to come back in a year, or encouraged you to market your products directly to consumers, bypassing the messy health care system. You consider this…hard, decide they might be right, and begin feeling a bit better about your prospects for launching sometime before your 50th birthday.

And then you have Sunday dinner with your mom, and she talks reverently about the information her doctor gave her on her heart condition during the five minutes he wasn’t glued to his Epic screen and about how the nurse practitioner (whose daughter is about your age) is going to monitor her blood pressure and heart rate remotely. And it hits you: mom really, really values what the doctor and his nurse tell her and wouldn’t dream of using some new health app without first gaining their validation and assurance that whatever she did would help her stay healthier.

On the drive home, you decide that cutting out the messy healthcare system probably won’t work after all. For a moment, you consider just targeting healthy twenty and thirtysomethings who are less awestruck in the presence of white coats, but that’s not (yet) where the big healthcare market is. You’re stuck again.

So what do you do with your terrific technology?

• Start with their problem, not your solution. Find the pressure points that are driving physicians and patients crazy. The list is very long. Fix one of those problems. Spend time figuring out how your impressive technology can address a current gap in healthcare, as is happening with medication adherence.It doesn’t matter (yet) if you can offer a seamless technology solution; your application doesn’t have to integrate fully with the EHRs. (Yes, I know this is heresy.) But if you fix a real problem now you will build a real following for tomorrow, provided you assume responsibility for making your information immediately safe, secure, relevant, and accessible and don’t create more work for the doctors, nurses, and healthcare staffs who are already in extremis.
• Focus on creating actionable, contextual information as part of your health solution. Case in point: wearables are great, and more will come, and we’ll be healthier for them. But the data they produce, devoid of context have limited value. Knowing you’ve walked 10,000 steps is interesting. But knowing that those 10,000 steps have materially changed (or not) your resting pulse or cardiac rhythms or medication efficacy or oxygen levels or mental acuity is potentially actionable—by you and those you rely on to keep you alive and healthy. Durable new markets come from actionable not interesting information.
• Consider back end as well as front end value. The ‘moment of value,’ to use a consumer marketing term, is the point when a product or service changes an important outcome for its user. The Uber “front end” experience has material value to the consumer—avoiding standing in the rain to hail a cab.But there’s also great value that flows from the moments following that initial moment of satisfaction—when an insight the customer shares, or his openness to consider other products you offer, or his willingness to make a recommendation to other potential customers creates material value for the provider of the service (and, ultimately, for customers, also). This is “back end” value.Retailers like Amazon leverage both front and back end value superbly well to make our lives easier and their own products better. Healthcare providers haven’t yet learned to do this, mostly because they haven’t had to, and they can’t—their core transaction systems are oriented toward the service being provided not the customer being served. In this sense, my analogy might seem strained.

  But the comparison is becoming more relevant. And as consumer oriented sensibilities begin to pervade healthcare, as they surely will, the opportunity to create value for providers and patients through your health technology and the contextualized information it provides during critical care moments and beyond will be enormous.

  Yes, in the current environment, this is a tough sell. But as the EHR tsunamis pass, and providers focus on the competitive need to gain more patients and differentiate their services in deeper ways than are happening today, your ability to create data flows of actionable insight will be highly valuable and recognized as such.

• Take the long view. You picked healthcare; you knew or should have known it would be complicated. In the meantime, find some angels who’ve had life altering health events. They can tell you about some problems in healthcare that need to be fixed and will probably be willing to help you fix them. The market isn’t going away; sickness is an annuity stream of great length and breadth.

So, hang in there. Healthcare needs you.