Tech innovators and healthcare professionals have really revamped the present healthcare situation. In the past, calculation, analysis, therapy, and even communication were done conventionally. However, the times have changed in the healthcare industry. Groundbreaking medical innovations have caught everybody off guard positively and are widely embracing the convenience and expeditious processes.
What is a Digital Health Startup?
Digital health is the integration of digital technologies with the different aspects of healthcare to improve its analysis, implementation, delivery, and prescription. The rudimentary facets of digital healthcare startups are as follows:
- Hardware and software sensors
- Microprocessors
- Wireless devices
- Internet
- Social networks
- Mobile networks
- Integrated circuits
- Genomics/Genetics
Benefits of Digital Health Products
How many of you had to drive all the way from your home to the nearest clinic to have your blood pressure checked by a nurse? Seems like a tedious task, isn’t it? An amazing innovation that gives patients and people in general convenience is blood pressure monitoring devices. And that’s just one of them. Some of the most common ones that have aided attending physicians and patients are:
- Health fitness watches
- Vital sign monitoring devices
- Sleep induction technology
- Indoor air quality monitor
- Artificial vision improvement device
- Digital rehabilitation device
- Microprocessor joint improvement system
- Metabolism trackers
- Communication applications for doctors and patients
With this in mind, the question is: Is now really a high time for an aspiring health-tech?
If you are an up and coming health-tech and you have the determination, resources, and ample know-how, we bet you can absolutely excel in this industry, if not, even garnered a Nobel Prize for a genius undertaking. However, this endeavor shouldn’t be taken lightly. You need collaborations with healthcare experts and healthcare organizations to obtain various perspectives, helpful advice, and gain like-minded partners who will stick with you for the long haul.
Ways to Get Successful Digital Health Startup Collaborations
The old adage, “Take a leap of faith,” might not be suitable in this monumental endeavor. You can’t just jump into conclusions, production, and materialization without careful scrutiny of your desired goal. Here are 5 tips on how you can get profitable digital health startup collaborations:
1. Make Sure You Have Clear Business Goals
Partnerships are intended to take advantage of what the other party can offer. It’s should be a win-win situation for both partners. A small digital health startup should offer precise value to bigger healthcare institutions so their proposals are welcomed and in turn, the startups can benefit from the knowledge and scale that major healthcare organizations have.
In order to do this, you must first do ample research on which large healthcare institutions will likely be interested in your project. Next is to define a clear value proposition to see eye to eye with the prospective partners. Make sure that both of you have the same goals. One reason why partnerships turn sour, and this goes for all business ventures, is because of misconceptions about the common value proposition.
2. Determine Your Scope
We know this might be too obvious to even put in the list. But sometimes this is why businesses go awry. Aspiring entrepreneurs sometimes hit the ground running when starting a new endeavor that they forget to really sit down and jot down what it really is they’re trying to solve, do, offer, or change. First, choose which area in the healthcare industry you want to meddle with and be clear about what problems you are trying to solve.
What medical conditions are you trying to resolve? What kind of services do you want to provide to patients? These are just some of the questions you need to ask yourself. You need to be able to seamlessly articulate what medical problems you want to be aided through your products. This is also one way to narrow down the health organizations or healthcare professionals you’ll turn to. That way, you’re saving yourself time, money, and effort as well.
3. Create a Dynamic Squad of Experts
Always remember that you are an entrepreneur who is seeking the good of a digital healthcare business. You don’t have to be a doctor to start this journey nor do you need one to be able to operate this type of niche. What you need to do though is to organize a team of experts, each bringing their expertise to the table. The healthcare industry is such a vast business and when you integrate technology into it, you can be looking at approaching several different experts on various fields such as pharmaceutical, healthcare economics, telecommunications or electrical science. If you do your due diligence and seek out to those who have the same vision as you, they would most likely want in on the enterprise. In addition, you also don’t need these professionals to work with you permanently but you want to make sure that they get involved when the need arises.
4. Put Up an Adequate Runway
A funding runway is a budget your startup has before it can get off the ground. This means you need to procure more than enough the estimated capital to anticipate for the business flops along the way. Typically, a company might need around 18 to 24 months of funding runway. You could have a high demand for your products but not have ample cash runway to purchase or manufacture the new equipment. This is also one of the reasons why a startup crashes and burns.
5. Do Frequent Collaboration Sessions
Multinational healthcare companies don’t just throw away their money by investing in any digital health startup that approaches them for partnerships. They want to make sure they’re putting their money to good use. In order for you to do that, think of ingenious ideas that will make them realize that your innovation could make waves in the healthcare industry one day. Collaboration sessions don’t find success once. It should be repeated through workshops, brainstorming sessions, along with a team of experts with a go-getter attitude.
Conclusion
The advantage of partnering with large healthcare companies is that you are helping them bridge the gap between their large-scale macro managed business and a variety of their customers or patients. The biggest tip of all is to just act on it. If it’s for better customer experience, it might have a chance in the market – when you take heed of these digital health startup collaboration tips, of course.
