You don’t need an MD. You need the right questions, the right partners, and the discipline to earn trust. Healthcare isn’t Silicon Valley theater. It’s systems, habits, liability, and human stakes. If you want to build something that lasts, start by changing what you aim to be: not a disruptor trying to rewrite care overnight, but a translator who builds solutions that actually fit into clinical life.
Table of Contents
Tips to Build Credible HealthTech Companies
1) Start with the provider’s day
Don’t invent a solution and then hunt for a problem. Watch clinicians work. Sit in clinics. Shadow nurses through a shift. You’ll learn quickly which frictions are real and which are imagined. Practical move: spend a week observing workflows before writing a single product spec. Note hand-offs, exceptions, and where staff improvise — those are the places innovation can be useful.
2) Make clinical empathy operational
Empathy isn’t a marketing line — it’s a process. Translate what providers tell you into design constraints and acceptance criteria. For example, if nurses say a new UI must be usable with gloved hands, that becomes an engineering spec. The practical move is to convert every observation into a testable requirement your team can sign off on.
3) Learn the rules that matter
You don’t need to memorize every regulation, but you must understand the contours that determine whether your product can be used in care:
- What qualifies as a medical device
- What counts as protected health information
- Basic procurement expectations
These shape product, architecture, and go-to-market. Consider creating a one-page “risk map” listing regulatory and privacy risks. The team members should own each.
4) Hire translators
Degrees are useful. Translation skills are essential. Your early hires should include people who can move between clinical language, product constraints, and regulatory reality — engineers who ask clinical questions, product folks who understand risk, and marketers who respect clinical priorities. You can add a quick “translation” interview exercise — have candidates explain a technical decision to a clinician and summarize a clinician’s workflow for an engineer.
5) Clinicians must do more than lend credibility
A headshot and an advisory-board line are not a partnership. Real clinical partners will change your onboarding, flag hidden failure modes, and help you pilot adoption inside a health system. So, you can recruit at least two clinician collaborators who will join sprint reviews and pilot planning, and pay them for their time.
6) Measure both clinical value and operational value
Hospitals buy outcomes + operational clarity. Show how a clinical improvement also impacts throughput, cost, or risk. The story that convinces procurement mixes patient benefit and measurable operational impact.
For every pilot, define one clinical metric (e.g., error rate, patient-reported experience) and one operational metric (e.g., time per task, cost per case) you’ll report.
7) Design marketing as evidence
Healthcare marketing must be truthful, transparent, and clearly sourced. Use case studies, protocol-level descriptions, and validated outcomes. Tell the story of work saved, pain avoided, or decisions clarified — not glossy promises. Every public claim must map to a documented source (pilot data, peer review, or clinician testimonial) and be reviewable by your clinical partners.
8) Build culture around humility and reproducible rigor
The easiest way to lose trust is to overpromise. The fastest way to build it is to be disciplined: transparent validation, reproducible pilot methods, and a willingness to iterate when clinicians raise concerns.
So, publish short, honest post-pilot reports internally and to partners that show what worked, what didn’t, and how you’ll change the next pilot.
9) Be deliberate about go-to-market
Run pilots that are designed to answer specific operational questions, with pre-agreed success criteria and an implementation plan for scale. Treat procurement as a process — they want risk mitigation, not evangelism. You can write a 1-page pilot charter for each site: goals, metrics, timeline, responsibilities, and an exit/scale decision rule.
10) Your real advantage: synthesis, not credentials
Non-clinical founders can excel because they connect domains — software and safety, design and compliance, operations and empathy. Use that vantage to build bridges rather than to claim authority.
A short founder’s checklist (do this in week one)
- Observe 3 clinical shifts and capture 10 workflow notes.
- Create a one-page risk map for compliance and data privacy.
- Recruit 2 clinicians to participate in sprint reviews (paid).
- Define 1 clinical metric + 1 operational metric for your first pilot.
- Draft a pilot charter with clear exit/scale rules.
Final note
Health systems don’t adopt ideas because they’re new — they adopt them because they’re reliable, defensible, and useful. If you build with humility, insist on clinical truth, and measure both patient and operational impact, you’ll win the only way that matters inside care: by earning trust.
Originally posted on Bullzeye Global Growth Partner