I was cheering more or less all the way through your piece Halle :)
As we discussed on your Closing Time podcast as well (Jan '24), as the founder of Awell I've seen too many early stage startups look at our platform, thinking they need to build rather than buy, only to see them spend millions of VC capital on infrastructure that won't create any differentiating value.
One statement from the piece I would disagree with - "Buy now, Build later": if you humor the analogy, no one these days should consider first running in the cloud and then building their own cloud. For certain types of software (especially if it sits down in the stack, close to the bare metal infra) there might never be a need to build. The main differentiator is close to the end user: patient and care team - but you make that point yourself.
Halle, love this piece. The tech isn’t the product, care is framing is spot on. Most folks get lost chasing AI instead of asking the boring but essential question: does this help us serve more patients and create meaningful outcomes? If not, it’s just overhead in disguise. Appreciate the clarity here. More founders need to read this before writing a single line of code.
Halle, maybe implicit in some of your categories, but worth making explicit: technology in health care can dramatically improve RELIABILITY of health care processes that historically count on well-intended, multitasking and error prone humans. So many examples I witnessed as a hospital CEO: the important ancillary CT finding that didn’t get followed up on until a malignancy is far advanced; medication errors of all types especially including dosages with a misplaced decimal; retained foreign objects in surgical procedures; etc etc etc.
I was cheering more or less all the way through your piece Halle :)
As we discussed on your Closing Time podcast as well (Jan '24), as the founder of Awell I've seen too many early stage startups look at our platform, thinking they need to build rather than buy, only to see them spend millions of VC capital on infrastructure that won't create any differentiating value.
One statement from the piece I would disagree with - "Buy now, Build later": if you humor the analogy, no one these days should consider first running in the cloud and then building their own cloud. For certain types of software (especially if it sits down in the stack, close to the bare metal infra) there might never be a need to build. The main differentiator is close to the end user: patient and care team - but you make that point yourself.
...patient, care team, or unique data set.
Halle, love this piece. The tech isn’t the product, care is framing is spot on. Most folks get lost chasing AI instead of asking the boring but essential question: does this help us serve more patients and create meaningful outcomes? If not, it’s just overhead in disguise. Appreciate the clarity here. More founders need to read this before writing a single line of code.
Halle, maybe implicit in some of your categories, but worth making explicit: technology in health care can dramatically improve RELIABILITY of health care processes that historically count on well-intended, multitasking and error prone humans. So many examples I witnessed as a hospital CEO: the important ancillary CT finding that didn’t get followed up on until a malignancy is far advanced; medication errors of all types especially including dosages with a misplaced decimal; retained foreign objects in surgical procedures; etc etc etc.
Really excellent, methodical read; just shared with one of my portfolio founders