#226 - Chris Dial, CEO of Salutare - on growing traction in Healthcare by creating pull.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to join up Healthcare and prevent people from having cancer, losing their mobility, or their lives due to errors and delays. My guest is Chris Dial, Co-founder and CEO of Salutare.

Chris started his career as an analyst at Forrester Research. He joined Microsoft in 2002, where - over a period of 18 years - he enjoyed several roles from Sr. Product Manager all the way up to Microsoft's Senior Director of Cloud ISVs and Startups. Here, he led the process of finding and making successful software companies building and running apps using Microsoft SQL, Azure, and Dynamics. He managed this innovation team across 12 European countries.

In December 2020, he co-founded Salutare, which he leads as the CEO. They believe that no patient should ever be lost. Every clinician and patient benefits when they are in dialogue together on the patient’s journey, and clinicians can be freed from performing many manual tasks. Salutare is on a mission to create online services where this dialogue happens and where the greatest improvements for healthcare can be made for better outcomes.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Chris to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the process of joining up healthcare - and why doing nothing is not an option. Chris shares his approach to making the impossible possible - and the lessons he learned to overcome the hurdles to gain traction.

He shares his advice to stay mentally sane in the day-to-day battle that startups face to create meaningful change. Lastly, he shares his secrets to creating software that people love to work with - every single day.

Here's one of his quotes:

It's extremely rewarding when you hear about these cases that you can make an impact. We had an early pilot participant in one of the hospitals, and she said, 'Saturday is my favorite working day. During the week, I've got to deal with all these other hospital systems. And then I work on your software. But on Saturday, I only work with your software, and it's a pleasure.'

And I was so touched by that. And I shared it with the team. And I said we have to aim for that nonstop every day. That's what we want people to say.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How you can create transformative change by addressing problems that cross silos
2. Why customer anecdotes of joy should be a must-have metric to track for every R&D department.
3. How to get customers to coach you to make the deal happen.
4. Why you should design both for adoption and diffusion momentum - and how

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Chris Dial
• Website Salutare