The speed to value problem

If you are a sick care entrepreneur, you need to understand how to achieve speed to value and the challenges it presents. The main one is doing appropriate due diligence on a vendor proposal v the time, effort and money it takes to do so.

Take AI, for example. The world of finance can also help us understand if AI will be democratizing or consolidating. Here, the answer is less equivocal. Where AI has been pivotal (i.e., in financial markets), scale and speed are the critical determinants of success.

The term “speed-to-value” has been around as a management maxim for decades but is being reborn in the digital age — and its application for agents today is perfectly timed. Here’s why.

Speed-to-value refers to the need to continually develop innovative products and get them to market quickly. For sales people , speed itself is a value — being as responsive as possible to the customer, responding in real time to questions and requests, and delivering quotes and forms in hours instead of days and being rewarded with appropriate commissions or other benefits.

First, you should understand the definition of value.

Here's what to know about value propositions.

The FDA and other regulatory agencies have the same challenge. While the FDA's core mission is to protect the public health, it has to balance policies, procedures, rules and regulations such that is does not interfere with the deployement of products and services that are safe and effective without taking prolonged lengths of time to do so.

Sickcare entrepreneurs, particularly digital health entrepreneurs, vendors and hospital CIOs face the same issues. As one post suggests, "To be successful, we need to measure speed in terms of the time it takes for the business to realize the expected value and not project start and completion dates."

Here are some tips on how to increase speed to value.

Whether it be piloting a solution or selling your product or "partnering" with a strategic host, speed to value and the how vendors interact with sickcare customers will depend on :

1. A transactional approach v a strategic one and the incentives to sell one or another
2. The culture of the vendor and the customer
3. Technical, financial, cybersecurity and clinical risk tolerance
4. The problem that needs to be solved
5. How soon the problem needs to be solved
6. Whether the engagement if focused on the now, the next or the new
7. The maturity of the relationship and trust levels
8. The necessity to start with a service level agreement (SLA) or operational agreement as a starting point
9. The pace of sickcare IT change
10. The business model
11. Your customer success team results
12. Whether you are piloting or prototyping something or integrating it into a customer infrastructure and workflow

Individuals naturally want to establish themselves as competent and trustworthy in the eyes of their peers and leaders. But it’s much harder for people to work together on high-impact, complex transformation challenges if they’re more concerned with appearing trustworthy than with effective exchange of information and ideas. Here’s what that can look like in practice and ways to mitigate it.

If you are trying to find a partner who will pilot your digital health solution, e.g. be sure you understand before you try to be understood. In other words, start by being a problem solver not a problem seeker, understand the culture and personas of the decision makers first and then decide whether you just want to date ie. be transactional, or be something more and arrange to meet each other's parents.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship