In July 2022, Digital Health Business and Technology posted an interview of Dr. Lynn Simon, CMO of Community Health Systems, one of the largest health systems in the U.S. I found the following paragraph on how Community Health Systems buys digital health software illuminating as it explained a lot of why sales cycles can be upwards of 18 months for health tech companies.
What is the process for how Community Health Systems chooses digital health solutions to adopt?
We have a small team that is on the lookout for different technologies, such as machine learning or AI, or digital consumer engagement. We then try to see which ones align with some of our key priorities around safety, quality, operational efficiency and consumer engagement. And then if we find things that seem to be a match for what we’re trying to achieve, we’ll bring in more of our clinical folks to assess it. We have a physician leadership group that helps us review some of these technologies and see if it’s something that they feel will enhance their patients’ care and will help them in the office. Then we’ll do some due diligence, and we’ll look for other organizations that have used the technology and find out what their results were.
Then we have to go through a significant review from a clinical, financial, technical and cybersecurity perspective. If it involves machine learning or AI, we have a data scientist that will evaluate the algorithms. Obviously, we want to know if the technology is approved or cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). After all that we’ll run a pilot and see if it gets the results as intended and determine if we want to scale further.
Let’s pull this answer apart and give recommendations
“We have a small team that is on the lookout for different technologies, such as machine learning or AI, or digital consumer engagement.”
Chris: Brand awareness is important as it may be difficult to pinpoint and identify a small team inside a large health system. Spend at least 20% of your budget on earned media and programmatic advertising to get in front of influencers and recommenders. Look into technologies like Bombora’s Company Surge that have intent data so you can see what particular health systems are searching for online.
“We then try to see which ones align with some of our key priorities around safety, quality, operational efficiency, and consumer engagement.”
Chris: You better have a clear and succinct narrative about how your product fits into safety, quality, operational efficiency, or consumer engagement because that’s all they are spending on. “Nice to haves” will be ignored.
“And then if we find things that seem to be a match for what we’re trying to achieve, we’ll bring in more of our clinical folks to assess it. We have a physician leadership group that helps us review some of these technologies and see if it’s something that they feel will enhance their patients’ care and will help them in the office.”
Chris: If you are a digital health company without a medical advisory board or at least a few physicians on your team, go get them today. Clinicians like talking to peer clinicians, not software developers. Ask your physicians to work with marketing to develop thought leadership and use case content.
“Then we’ll do some due diligence, and we’ll look for other organizations that have used the technology and find out what their results were.”
Chris: It’s almost impossible to close your first health system customer without an existing relationship. Hire salespeople with relationships and then ask your first health systems for permission to publish a case study if the pilot goes well. You will lose money on the pilot, so you might as well get a case study and press release in return.
Selling digital health into health systems is for the brave
Implementing the proper strategy and marketing with the help of an experienced health IT marketing agency can make sure you’re at least concerned and can shorten sales cycles once you are in the door.
