4 Things Startups Must Know to Achieve a Successful Tech Pilot

Providers have been scaling up their tech and IT spend in recent years, increasingly conducting tech pilots to see which solutions can best improve their enterprise’s clinical and operation success.

During a panel discussion held Wednesday at MedCity News’ INVEST Digital Health conference in Dallas, healthcare leaders shared their insight on how startups can best serve their provider partners during these pilots.

Ask providers how you can be their partner

Rosy Wellness was founded in 2018 as a direct-to-consumer women’s health startup, but it has since established several partnerships with providers, CEO Lyndsey Harper noted.

She said her startup — which focuses on female sexual wellness, as well as other women’s health issues like endometriosis and menopause — started pursuing these partnerships after realizing what an asset it could be to the traditional healthcare system.

“There was this gap — physicians and other providers want to do better, and patients need a lot more. How can we fill that gap? That’s really what Rosy does — we’re with the patient 24/7 when she’s not with her provider. That value prop is an easy sell to providers because that is something that they’re looking for,” Harper declared.

Rosy quickly realized that it could be a complement to traditional providers’ care delivery models, so it pivoted to a provider partner model in addition to its core direct-to-consumer model. The startup employs a holistic approach to women’s health management — an approach that most traditional providers simply don’t have the time or resources to employ, Harper pointed out.

For Rosy, quickly expanding to a business model that includes tech pilots with traditional providers was a smart decision — a decision that more direct-to-consumer startups may want to consider, she said.

Demonstrate a solid integration plan

When a hospital is thinking about beginning a tech pilot with a vendor, it really wants to know that the vendor is capable of understanding the various technological intricacies of the hospital’s existing technology and operations systems, pointed out Chris Carruthers, chief innovation officer at DexCare.

DexCare — a Providence spinout offering health systems a platform to help them coordinate and manage digital care — was “lucky” to be born out of a huge health system, he noted.

“We had the ability to have a conversation with just about any large enterprise health system because we were essentially fully integrated into [Providence’s] EHRs — they had five at the time, and luckily it’s consolidated to three now. We knew how to do it like the back of our hand. We understood the challenges of working with 13 different internal organizations to get an implementation done — and many health systems have the same reality,” Carruthers explained.

Having this type of expertise is extremely attractive to health system customers, he said. 

Have some humility

Tech pilots tend to have the best outcomes when the hospital and vendor agree that the pilot is the first step toward a bigger deployment in the future, said Ashish Atreja, CIO and chief digital health officer at UC Davis Health.

“If [a vendor] does a pilot for pilot’s sake —  just for marketing or to show to the investors — then you do the pilot, and it’s done. There’s nothing else after that. But the goal is scalable transformation,” he declared.

With this goal in mind, startups should approach their partnerships with humility, Atreja added.

In other words, instead of telling hospitals how great the product is and how much they need to buy it, vendors should try to work with hospitals to understand their specific pain points. That way, the vendor and the hospitals can work together to modify the product so it can best address the organization’s unique needs, Atreja explained.

If you’re going to hawk AI, make sure it’s good

Over the past few years, it seems like every digital health startup is promoting its AI capabilities,  noted Hubert Zajicek, CEO of healthcare seed accelerator Health Wildcatters. However, it’s unclear if all these startups are truly using AI to make a difference in healthcare.

“Are you really using AI, or are you just dressing up your software startup?,” he asked.

AI isn’t the glorious buzzword that some startup founders may think it is. When you try to sell a provider an AI solution, you’re introducing them to a new layer of risk, Zajicek remarked.

That means that the startup will need to have some AI experts on its team that can define that risk to providers and help them mitigate it, he said.

Atreja of UC Davis Health agreed that this is an important consideration for startups to think about. UC Davis Health has about 800 portfolio products in its IT stack, and about half of them involve an AI component, he noted.

“The California attorney general said that for every single AI application that comes into healthcare, we have to prove it is not biased — but it’s the same budget we have in IT. Now, we have to look at all these 400 applications and do vendor management. It’s not just vendor management, though — we have to look at the data, what they have done, and then analyze it,” Atreja explained.

AI isn’t just a buzzword — so if you’re going to make it a key part of your value proposition, do so carefully, he said.

Photo: Nick Fanion, Breaking Media