According to the official website of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S. health care spent $3.6 trillion in 2018. Out of that $3.6 trillion, $1.2 trillion, or 33% went to hospital care. 

If you’re a digital health startup, partnering with a hospital or hospital system seems like a great way to reach new markets and increase the bottom line. 

If only selling to hospitals was easy. 

Unfortunately, hospitals, hospital systems, medical centers, and physician practices can be tough to break through especially for new med-tech companies. 

Barriers health companies face

Different factors make the sale process difficult. Let’s take a closer look at some of the challenges most companies face.

• Multiple decision-makers – There was a time when doctors were the primary decision-makers in the purchasing decision.  Today, doctors are one of the many people you’ll be talking to, along with someone from the management team, the sales team, and various committees. Usually, the decision comes from several layers above various individuals and more often by a committee.

• Long sales cycles – Having more buyers involved in the buying process, with different priorities and perceived system needs, results in a complex sales process. Product purchases are subjected to scrutiny by different committees and individuals, so you have to consider the competing interests. If you are in sales, this translates into jumping through a lot of hurdles before you get approval. You have to prove the value of your solution across different sections, from patient safety to hospital finances and hospital operations.  All these things translate to one thing – it takes a long time for a decision to be approved.

• Competition – Aside from the challenges within the hospital system, there’s also stiff competition among med-tech companies. Companies with minimal modifications to the original product’s design are known to hit the market and can grab large chunks of the market share.  Mergers and acquisitions among the different medical device companies can also be a disruptive force in the competition.

• Consumerization – The increasing demand for reducing the cost of care without impacting the cost of care is a challenge that both hospitals and health companies face. For hospitals, it involves both the administrative and clinical side of the business.  For companies, it means finding ways to bring higher efficiency and minimize costs. The sales team must make sure that the product is profitable to the hospital and brings a new revenue stream.

Empowering med tech companies

Anatoly Geyfman saw all the difficulties companies face in selling to health, so he founded Carevoyance, a healthcare sales enablement solution for med-tech companies. 

Carevoyance makes selling to doctors and hospitals easier.

How? By leveraging data and making it available not just to the wealthiest players in the market but also to startups. 

Anatoly explains the kind of data his company uses. 

“If you think about how healthcare is performed, there’s all sorts of information that goes into the systems of record of use at facilities and offices where patients are treated. So eventually that data flows through a number of intermediaries and goes into the insurance companies for payment or maybe gets stored in the health care vaults of these hospitals. And it could be billing data, it could be charged data, it could be notes data. It could even be imaging data. And there’s a little bit of information in each of those aspects of the data continuum. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to stitch together a lot of these data sets into a holistic map of health care.”

Through all the collected data, Carevoyance can see trends, like types of modalities of care physicians are utilizing, types of procedure, etc. The collected data is pooled and tailored to whatever the needs of the med-tech companies are when it comes to presenting their data. 

“In today’s busy world, physicians don’t have time to waste on fruitless pursuits. Physicians don’t want to hear your story if it doesn’t pertain to them. And you shouldn’t be even telling it because you’ve got other things to do as a salesperson. So to increase efficiency in our market, hopefully to decrease the cost of at least the go to market cost, we use data to orient sales and marketing strategies.”

When a sales rep goes to a hospital, they can pull up the profile of the hospital and get all of the information that they need for the facility. This makes it easy to create data-driven sales presentations and close more deals. 

Drive your sales effort now!

Carevoyance is committed to helping health companies reach their full potential. When you need help in driving your sales effort, Carevoyance can help you!

Reach out to them or visit their website at https://www.carevoyance.com/.

Listen to my full conversation with Anatoly here:https://outcomesrocket.health/carevoyance/2020/08/