Gain insights into proven strategies and tactics that have help grow some of the most successful platforms in healthcare. Download the Guidebook for Digital Health Startups: Building Network Effects-Driven Platforms in Healthcare.

Starting and scaling a platform business is not for the faint of heart. Platform businesses face unique growth and market challenges that can be hard for both founders and investors to wrap their heads around. Worse, not understanding these challenges – or how to effectively navigate them – can prove to be the death knell to a platform business, making it difficult to attract users, align on vision and secure financing. These obstacles are only exacerbated in an industry as complex as healthcare. 

The good news is, from a financial perspective, healthcare platforms have the strongest business model. Private sector digital health platforms are valued 2.4x higher than their non-platforms peers, and public digital health companies valued 1.8x higher. These platform companies grow faster, scale quicker and are more efficient with capital and assets. 

The bad news is that digital health platforms must also deal with several additional layers of complexity, in part because of the industry in which they operate: the uniqueness of economic incentives, the number of gatekeepers, health data fragmentation and regulation, and elaborate technology procurement practices, among others.  

This means starting, growing and optimizing a platform business requires a radically different approach – one that involves a deep understanding of how platforms grow and scale, and how to implement proven platform launch and scale tactics to succeed at all stages of growth. 

Summit Health’s New Guidebook for Digital Health Startups 

From overcoming the “cold start” problem to monetizing the network, Summit Health Advisors’ Building Network Effects-Driven Platforms in Healthcare: A Guidebook for Digital Health Startups offers an informed, illustrative and practical roadmap for digital health startups looking to grow and scale their platform businesses.

The guidebook offers hard-hitting advice and detailed recommendations for how digital health platforms can achieve accelerated business growth and outsized financial returns by building a dominant, world-class platform in healthcare. The resource also includes additional perspectives from healthcare platform experts, founders and VCs. 

Request a copy of the guidebook here to learn how to:

• Map your approach | Understanding how platforms are best positioned to tackle the greatest challenges in healthcare and drive the greatest business growth. 

• Set up base camp | Bringing your platform to market by overcoming the cold start problem and monetizing your network.

• Advance up the mountain | Accelerating adoption, utilization and monetization of your platform to accelerate growth. 

• Reach the summit | Growing beyond your core users, products and markets to build impenetrable network effects and exponential business growth.

• Implement learnings from leading healthcare platforms and VCs | Advice and best practices from leaders of some of today’s leading digital health platforms, including ZocDoc, Innovacer, Redox, Evidation, Sempre Health, Insight Partners, Define Ventures and a16z. 

In a funding environment seeing fewer deals at smaller rounds, being able to tell your platform’s story is just as important as understanding the unique circumstances and considerations needed for it to grow and scale.

“First, we look at the product. Have you already built software that makes sense for the customer and, when connected to the rest of the network, should create a huge customer ROI. Second, do you have an understanding of the value to be created for each side of your network? Third, we look for early proof of network effects. Most healthcare is local, in a way, so you can often see light and very regional network effects before it registers on a national scale.”

Scott Barclay, Managing Director, Insight Partners 

Summit Health Advisors is here to help.

Contact us and request your copy of the Building Network Effects-Driven Platforms in Healthcare: A Guidebook for Digital Health Startups here.