Every digital health startup is a clinic now

For this newsletter, I often team up with subject matter experts. This piece is a joint effort with Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, chief medical officer at Contigo Health and vice chair of neurosurgery at Geisinger Health.

It almost seems inevitable these days that digital health start-ups are becoming providers versus just selling into them.

It’s a progression that makes a lot of sense for all sorts of reasons. The famously long sales cycles to sell into providers have gotten even longer for solutions not considered mission-critical in a pandemic. And even at the best of times, convincing care teams that an app or widget will help improve a patient’s heart failure or diabetes is an uphill battle. Even when physicians buy in, as founders have learned the hard way, it’s not always clear who’s paying for digital solutions and how to embed them into the day-to-day workflow.