On the Eve of DHIS, Flare Capital’s Bill Geary Shares Top Seven Health Tech/Digital Health Truisms

Bill Geary, co-chair of the upcoming DHIS, does Digital Health entrepreneurs a favor by spelling out what he sees as signs of a strong pitch. (See below.) We also review the highlights of the upcoming DHIS.

• The most profound Health Tech/Digital Health companies are either: (1) taking on novel clinical and financial risk for those highest cost and most in need or (2) providing critical solutions and services to those new and legacy risk-bearing organizations working to deliver on the opportunity in (1).
• I'm an optimist. Our industry is nowhere near overfunded and the market/need is enormous/largely unmet; it's that there are simply too many narrowly focused solutions providers that have raised too much capital masquerading as real companies and that's the coming reckoning.
• The five most interesting and best Health Tech/Digital Health customer/market segments are, in this order: pharma, self-funded employers, payers, consumers, and providers, while keeping in mind that every successful company requires penetration (perhaps simultaneously) in two of the five.
• No one region of the US dominates our Health Tech/Digital Health industry like it does in traditional tech; it's spread out among 10+ major metro areas including Boston, SF, LA, Minneapolis, NYC, Nashville, Denver, Houston, RTP, Chicago, and Austin.
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning aren’t verticals. They’re a set of critically important technologies to be incorporated horizontally in every successful solutions provider, just like analytics.
• The more screwed up our US healthcare system the more opportunity there is for all of us to fix it: complexity + regulatory issues = profound potential cost-reduction impact, which is all about showing customers a 5:1 ROI with a ≤ 12-month payback.
• Just like in all other young emerging private companies, strength of team is most important, market opportunity is second, a compelling business model is third, and quality of product/solution is fourth. Don’t start at number 4 and work backward.