How To Pilot Healthcare

A Conversation with Roy Rosin, Eric Steager, & Todd Dunn

In the latest Dreamit podcast, Roy Rosin of Penn Medicine, Eric Steager of IBX, & Todd Dunn of Intermountain Healthcare discuss factors that lead to a successful pilot program for digital health startups. This panel offers an insider’s view of how chief innovation officers make decisions about implementing pilots, how they think about failure or validation, how to broach the question of pricing, and how to accelerate the process for getting your pilot launched.

If you download a music app or a finance app and it doesn’t work, no big deal. In healthcare, if you pilot something and it doesn’t work, people get sick, people get sued, and sometimes people die. — Eric Steager of IBX

Tips for creating a successful healthcare pilot

Every startup’s pilot process will be different depending on the level of maturity of the startup. For an organization to agree to a pilot, there generally needs to be a few people in the organization that want the pilot, a clinical champion who will fight for it, an executive sponsor who believes in it, and an operational driver who will do the day to day pushing.

But there are a few things you should know before approaching health systems to run a pilot. The answers to these questions will vary from startup to startup, but the following tips for founders by Roy Rosin, Todd Dun, and Eric Steager provide a baseline framework for thinking about pitching a successful pilot.

• You need to be highly responsive. You have to be willing to be on site, to respond to meetings and info requests extremely quickly, to demonstrate evidence constantly, and to give the provider some reason to believe that you are the right startup to make the difference — proof points, whatever you’ve tested to date, etc.
• Be easy to work with. Pilots are about moving as quickly as possible to gather evidence. Do not obsess over details of your contract. These contracts are fairly meaningless from the point of view of the startup, and startups redlining every line of a contract will be at a disadvantage. You should typically accept the contract as is. It’s a standard contract.
• Develop a systematic way of working. You should be aware of how difficult and complex healthcare settings are and start to develop deep relationships with clinicians and map out the process from the outset. The systematic way of working should be focused on looking for the things founders need to learn to get it right and engaging with clinicians as a member of the team.
• Have a good understanding of the impact of the workflow, especially as it relates to the clinician. Know where your solution will be used and how when you are pitching your pilot.
• Know what you are seeking to learn when you begin discussions to run a pilot. Learning plans are critical— one of the characteristics sought in founders is that they remain curious. The purpose of a pilot is to help a startup form a solution in a way that they could not do outside the system.
• Know your own business model. What assumptions have to hold true for your business to be viable?
• Stack your team with the right people. It is very helpful if there’s an active clinician on the team who can have an interesting dialogue with the clinicians taking part in the pilot and represent the voice of the clinician in the startup.
• Take a siloed approach. Don’t claim you’re going to change workflow or processes across multiple departments in an organization. That’s the surest way to get bogged down in legal purgatory.
• Know what pain you are solving. When you’re pitching a pilot, you need to quickly explain what ‘pain’ in concept is going to be solved? It’s no different from venture capital when an innovation officer asks that question. And you should have a single business unit that the innovation officer can pitch the problem to.
• Find your sponsor in the organization. Trials can get started extremely fast if a startup has already found a sponsor within the organization. If you find the right sponsor, trials can come to fruition in as little as 3 months.
• Find a ‘love metric.’ What is the one thing you would love for your solution to do for the hospital system? For example, if you say will reduce readmissions, then it opens up a new line of questions on how you will prove that your solution is moving that needle. You can isolate this metric and design a pilot to prove that.
• If you want to talk about pricing, you should think in terms of value capture. For example, you should say something like, ‘Here’s what we think we are changing things in your system. We’re getting rid of X number of readmissions, we’re lowering this infection rate, etc. And if we as a startup do it at this volume, here’s how it converts to dollars. Does this make sense?” If there’s a return for the hospital, then they will pay for your pilot.

Listen to the full podcast to learn about how hospitals think about failure (hint: it’s very different from the ‘fail often, fail fast’ mentality of most startups), non-scalable ways of moving your pilot along faster, and the idea of micro-pivots throughout the pilot process.