
@ShahidNShah
The National Institutes of Health Commercialization Program (NIH-CAP), designed to assist promising life science companies bring their technologies to market, is a nation wide program funded by NIH. NIH invited me to talk to this year’s class of SBIR/STTR grantees about how to commercialize their Healthcare IT, Media, and Training products at the 12th Annual NIH SBIR/STTR Conference held in Raleigh, NC last week. I’ve done this event for about 4 years now and it’s very well put together and heavily attended by companies looking to launch healthcare products. Here’s what I told them.
Align the Payers, Beneficiaries, and Users (PBU) of your product
There are three distinct groups you’re “selling” your products to:
I call this the “PBU alignment” problem. In a complex environment like healthcare, the three groups are often not the same — if you can find a market in which the payers, the beneficiaries, and the users are all the same then your sales job is easy. However, that’s commonly not the case. Let’s take a look at the typical example of a complex product like an electronic medical records (EMR) software package in the era of ARRA, HITECH, and meaningful use (MU). The “payer” may ultimately be government reimbursements through Medicare, the “beneficiaries” are the healthcare insurance firms and the government agencies that need the MU data, and the “users” are the doctors and staff at physicians offices and hospitals. Why has it taken decades for EMRs to be sold to just a tiny fraction of the total industry? Because the PBU alignment hasn’t been reached — until the users, beneficiaries, and payers of the products all understand the value and are willing to work together to achieve a goal it will be tough.
What’s the lesson and advice for your product? Figure out the PBU alignment problem and see how you’ll sell to each of the groups and make the right arguments — you do it right and you’ll make money. You forget the complexities of the PBU and you’ll be languishing, too.
Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Branding
Everyone tells small companies that they need to “do marketing” but that’s really hard to do so I started with a quick visual to explain what it means. It comes from Marty Neumeier on pages 24 and 25 of ZAG by way of the Brand Autopsy Blog (which I highly recommend reading) and illustrates the differences between Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Branding. It’s a wonderful visual and clearly shows that small companies should focus on marketing and free PR, shoot for branding and probably eschew advertising until they have enough money.
Healthcare Industry Fallacies
I continued with a brief discussion about how selling to the healthcare community is very hard but not for the reasons they might think. I mentioned that:
Conducting Market Research
Lots of startups don’t do basic market research so I suggested the following approach:
What types of Business Models to Consider
Some Success Criteria
I wanted to thank the hundreds of audience members for their great questions in Raleigh. If you have further queries that you think can help your fellow entrepreneurs, post them here and I’ll answers them as best as I can.
Shahid Shah is an internationally recognized enterprise software guru that specializes in digital health with an emphasis on e-health, EHR/EMR, big data, iOT, data interoperability, med device connectivity, and bioinformatics.
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