Make health care innovation a reality by improving your hospital interviews

Doctors don’t speak with you about your new digital health ideas? Here are 3 steps to drastically improve your interviews in hospital settings.

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

You probably already know how to conduct a professional interview. Maybe you used to find it easy to connect with interviewees and get them to share their perspectives openly. And then you went into healthcare… Many innovators who try to get interviews with doctors and nurses feel like they’re constantly hitting a wall.

In this article, we’ll discuss why you’re getting the cold shoulder from healthcare personnel and what you can do about it.

We’ll share the tools you need to navigate the hospital labyrinth. This will help you get your questions answered and your ideas tested, all while building good relationships with people in the field.

We frequently hear complaints from interviewers, such as:

• “Physicians simply don’t want to be part of healthcare innovation, they prefer to live in the old world.”
• “These folks never have time.”
• “I don’t even know where to find people willing to speak with me about digital health.’’

Frustrated, many researchers go through their family and friends, check out online forums, and find other workarounds to end up with 10 to 20 interviews that aren’t really representative. This is risky because it might give you a false sense of security, ultimately leading to investments in features and products that no one really wants.

Now, the funny part is that when we give talks about healthcare innovation to doctors, they voice similar complaints about innovators!

• “No one ever speaks with us when they build these digital health tools. It’s so painfully obvious that they have no idea what my reality really looks like.”
• “I’m tired of not being listened to. Who do these self-proclaimed ‘innovators’ think they are? Why do they think they can create something meaningful without having spent a single day on the frontlines of healthcare?”

When we ask doctors for interviews, some go above and beyond to help us. They’ve introduced us to colleagues and offered to present our solution at leadership meetings of their speciality’s professional association. They’ve even organized ethics committee hearings for us when we wanted approval to test our solution in their hospital.

Clearly, they have time for a health care venture if we make it truly interesting for them. Why wouldn’t they? Their daily work is so tough and the stakes are so high that anyone who brings the promise of a real solution to the table is truly deserving of their attention.

So, it seems that physicians are willing to collaborate and help you drive healthcare innovation forward. However, there are some unspoken rules for how to do it right. Here we’ll give you a 3-step guide on how to approach and interview doctors while building a product that every side can get excited about.

It’s all about how you do what you do!

The four steps to successful interviews

Step 1: Define your needs

Talk to the right person about your healthcare venture

We have seen many strategies come into play when you need to get creative and get those interviews done. Many people use an easy, “mass mailing approach.” They end up writing 200-some cold emails or LinkedIn messages and are surprised when no one replies. Then they might start a cold calling campaign to doctors’ offices, but this isn’t a solid strategy.

Set yourself up for success

To avoid this strategy and get turned down less often, you should make it clear to yourself:

Who is your perfect interviewee and why?

Here’s how to do your homework properly and find the person you should be talking with. Before making any moves, focus on getting to know the doctor you have decided to approach. Check the doctor’s profile page on the hospital website or on LinkedIn, Xing, or ResearchGate. Then do a Google search for published research, and finally read any blog posts the doctor has written.

When you are entirely sure why and how this physician can help you out, get ready to contact them. Make sure your message or call is not obviously a template. The message should be personalized, short, clear, and preferably include these aspects:

1) Why you are writing this email or making this call to this particular person

2) Your vision and where you stand in its execution

3) The problem that you are currently facing

4) How that problem can be solved with an interview and why this physician is the one with the answers

Extras: What’s in it for them, if they agree to talk to you? How long will your interview take?

By crafting this kind of message, you’re signalling that you’re not a timewaster, you know where your problems are, you did your research, and you’re knowledgeable. When you send a concrete message, interviewees will know what to expect from you. Doctors appreciate an approach like this and will be excited to help you drive healthcare innovation forward.

Step 2: Prepare for digital health care discussions

Being doctors ourselves, we reached out to former colleagues who still work at the bedside to understand why innovators have trouble interviewing them. They shared with us a few turnoffs and dealbreakers that they encounter during interviews.

1. Interviewers who aren’t knowledgeable enough

Let’s turn it around. Imagine you have agreed to be interviewed about your startup or about your revolutionary idea. However, the interview starts, and the interviewer doesn’t really know what a startup is, so you have to begin with explaining that. A bit of a turnoff, isn’t it? Would you like to partner up with your interviewer for further development of your project?

2. Interviewers who forget why they’re having the interview

Sometimes innovators come in with big ideas and pitches for digital health products and spend most of the interview explaining their concept. When you’re excited about your healthcare venture ideas, it can be easy to forget how little first-hand knowledge you have of the healthcare field. Interviews with healthcare personnel are an opportunity to listen, ask questions, and gain real insights from the people you hope will use your products. If innovators focus too much on explaining their ideas, their interviews are likely to be inefficient and low-value. In other words, a waste of time for both parties.

3. Interviewers who don’t know how to navigate in hospital settings

Hospital settings can be complicated and overwhelming, but innovators need to know their way around them. So, we’ve broken it down for you.

• Choose who you are talking to first. In hospitals, you never have just one buyer: you always have the user-buyer, the economic-buyer, and the technical-buyer. There is rarely a product that only needs input from the physician’s side. To understand how your solution can integrate into healthcare settings, you need a broad understanding. So, make sure to: Identify people you will need to talk to, using the hospital’s organizational chart! Who is going to buy it? Who is going to use it? Who is going to implement it?
• Delegate questions to different people, according to their expertise and field of work. You might find that some questions you want to ask physicians don’t entirely fit with their expertise. Select your questions carefully and talk to additional healthcare workers, such as hospital managers, data protection specialists, nurses, etc. This will help you to unwrap the complexity of healthcare and its entities.
• Remember that every hospital is different. There could be different workflow routines, different responsibilities for management and other workers, even a different approach to patient needs. Try to understand differences between hospitals and discuss your findings with your interviewees. When you bring this knowledge to the table you create space for interesting and valuable discussions.
• Avoid tailoring your healthcare innovation to a single hospital! Sometimes founders will establish a good contact with one hospital and its employees. They analyze the problems and pain points and find solutions for them. Unfortunately, these solutions are too adapted to one environment and can’t be applied to different hospital settings! On the other hand: try not to overgeneralize. There’s no single truth when it comes to workflow, processes, culture… The more you understand the differences and the commonalities, the higher your chances of finding something that scales.
• Get your general questions answered before you talk to a physician. Make sure all your questions about hospital-related settings are answered so that you can appear and be knowledgeable. You will be able to respond more thoroughly to what the physicians say and dive deep into expert knowledge.
• Interview a range of people. During your interviews, make sure you are covering various relevant specialities and all levels of seniority. Physicians working as doctors’ assistants will have very different routines and will not share the same reality with supervising doctors. This will help you develop a wider scope of your products’ application and possibilities.

There are other mistakes that interviewers might make, but these are easily fixable. If you are knowledgeable, you can gain trust and get a physician on your team. Remember:

• It’s a busy world out there, so be straightforward. It’s not an investment meeting, so you can leave your pitches behind and focus on what your interviewee has to say.
• Know what you need from your interviewee. Identify the questions related to their expertise and know exactly how they can help you. It’s hard to find a healthcare worker-philosopher; most of them are results and outcome-driven.
• Be respectful with their time and do not overextend the interview. We would even recommend being finished ahead of schedule. Physicians are always thankful if others respect their time.
• Express your gratitude and let them know how they have helped you. Hopefully, they’ll be interested in helping you again in the future.

If you want to be extra thoughtful, these suggestions could be the cherry on top of an interview that’s already great:

• Offer to pay for their time. Everybody assumes that time from doctors is free, be different.
• Don’t interview, talk to them instead. Doctors like simplicity and most of them are avoiding theatre kind scenarios.

Step 3: Stay connected with health care professionals

If the interview ran smoothly — you were cautious with the doctor’s time, you asked concrete questions, you were knowledgeable, and you remembered not to overindulge with that pitch — this could be the start of a longer-term working relationship. We say a meeting has succeeded when it ends with a commitment to advance to the next step.

However, even for this stage, you have to be prepared. It all comes down to taking this last step correctly. We suggest you improve your communication by thinking through how your interviewee could help you in the future and what kind of role a physician should play in a company.

Here is why:

Getting a doctor on board while creating an innovative healthcare solution is very valuable:

• You’ll get referrals to interview their colleagues and most likely will not need to “cold contact” a doctor again, assuming there are more health-related products in your future.
• You’ll have an easier time testing your solution in a hospital setting.
• They can help you conduct clinical trials, if needed.

Here is how you can prepare for this last step:

• Make healthcare innovation interesting for them: show them how they will be able to learn and grow while staying involved with the project.
• Be prepared to offer possible involvement options. These should include anything from an offer to sign up for a newsletter to a seat at the medical advisory board. Consider, of course, what are the roles or contacts needed for your particular project?

Next challenge: Adaption and implementation

In brief, what do you need to create a truly impactful and needed healthcare innovation?

The answer: a good relationship with the people in the field.

Key takeaways for your interview strategy in hospital settings:

• Invest your time in defining your needs: Who is the person you need to talk to? What questions need to be addressed?
• Cold contacting only works if your message contains a vision, a problem, and how it can be solved with the expertise of the person you are contacting.
• Knowledge is power. Take time to understand the structure of the hospital and the workflow there.
• Know how you want to be helped.
• Find a strategy for possible collaborations.
• Make it interesting for them.

Following these steps will help you navigate the hospital setting labyrinth, build a qualified healthcare practitioner network, and create a truly meaningful and innovative solution.

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Jonė Pukėnaitė is a medical expert at FoundersLane. After her medical degree at Vilnius University, she became a Medical Manager and later a CEO at a private healthcare institution. She then cofounded a health-tech startup “VoiceMed’’ and established an educational platform “Explore Digital Health’’ for young medical professionals.

FoundersLane creates new, fast-growing digital companies in categories that are highly topical and current. FoundersLane counts more than 100 founders, experts and entrepreneurs with great expertise in the fields of medicine, health, climate, disruptive technologies such as IoT connectivity, AI, and machine learning. Clients and partners include SMEs and corporations as well as more than 30 Forbes listed companies, such as Trumpf, Vattenfall, Henkel and Baloise. FoundersLane is active in Europe, MENA and Asia with offices in Berlin, Cologne, Vienna and London.