Digital health companies: It's time to be bold
There's a lack of collective action in this space and it's holding us all back.
Digital health companies are fighting a war on every front.
It is so hard out there to be a health-technology founder in 2024. I’m exhausted by osmosis, and I’m not even the one doing the grind that operating teams are doing every day. And to be doing it in this venture market… well it’s tough.
Adding to all that, most people who’ve been in the space for any length of time will tell you that it’s a lot harder to be in health-tech than almost anywhere else. The sales cycles are long and slow; the incumbents dominate and lack the incentives to innovate; and even just getting to the individual or individuals who can actually make a buying decision can take months. Months that companies don’t have to waste.
So where has this left us, about two decades into this experiment to modernize U.S. healthcare? Well, it looks like we're still funding companies that aim to finally rid us of fax machines, so I'd argue it's been a whole lot of ‘one step forward and two steps back.’
But we could be much …