Readers Write: Narrow Your Focus: Amplify Your Impact

Narrow Your Focus: Amplify Your Impact
By Steve Shihadeh

Steve Shihadeh is founder of Get-to-Market Health of Malvern, PA.

Recently, we have observed the healthcare technology market and evolving companies that are feeling pressure to be all things to all people by offering broad solutions and application suites. This product approach is tempting in today’s healthcare technology field as health systems lean toward buying from fewer vendors.

Based on recent trade shows and our read of the market, too many companies end up with a murky product strategy and struggle to land a differentiated message. Our clear recommendation is to:

Focus and then focus 10 times harder.

When you look at some of the biggest success stories in our field, they all started with a very narrow problem set and got great at solving it. Here are three relevant examples:

• Epic’s first application was built to address ambulatory clinic scheduling in large academic medical centers. It was tricky and complicated, but they mastered it and gained credibility with market leaders who then looked to Epic for more.
• Nvidia saw graphics-based processing as the best trajectory for tackling challenges that had eluded general-purpose computing methods. They were obsessed about how to make their graphics processing units increasingly powerful. Subsequently, Wall Street has anointed them with a massive market cap, and Nvidia has a significant order backlog.
• The Livongo team did not try to be awesome at 10 things. They focused squarely on helping employers manage a single disease, diabetes. The market rewarded them with a $18 billion buyout.

Where are you trying to excel? If you are looking to solve real healthcare challenges, you need to be completely dialed into your customers’ needs and issues. To use a cliché, what is really keeping your customers up at night and stressing their metrics? Deeply understand a narrow set of their pain points and work obsessively to make their business function better.

For example, be great at connecting payers and providers, or be the best at the back third of the rev cycle, or deliver amazing tools to help radiologists get the full patient care picture of the images they are viewing. Whatever you prioritize, first be fantastic at one important function that solves a key customer priority.

Being magnificent at one thing can solve key challenges, especially for emerging health tech companies:

• It helps employees, clients and investors get your “why.”
• Focusing intently on narrow greatness builds a natural moat that defends against competitors and protects your growing business
• It leads you in the right direction for key product investment decisions.
• It helps potential buyers secure funding for your solution by giving them superlatives by which to remember you.
• Concentrating in one area allows you to demonstrate a straightforward ROI.
• It makes you an attractive partner for other healthcare tech solutions, as you may not be able to go it alone forever.
• It enables investors to clearly see your path to profits.

Once you are excellent at one thing, options multiply for your company. Become the brand that KLAS and others praise. Then build adjacent apps that amplify your presence and/or make you attractive to potential buyers.

With some buyers looking for suite solutions, our advice might seem contrarian. However, most great companies buck the trend to break through the noise, and there is a lot of noise in the health tech landscape. It ranges from claims of “AI-everywhere” to changing regulatory impacts from the new administration. Our current environment is extremely confusing and distracting to healthcare buyers, and it will take your focus, obsession, and amazing solutions to stand out in the crowd.

Give important stakeholders a reason to understand what you do by going for narrow greatness that will drive dividends down the road.