Over the past several years, I have met many physician founders who can describe the clinical problem behind their company in extraordinary detail. They know where the workflow breaks, which patients struggle, and why the current solution falls short. Then I ask a different question: who pays for the product?
That question often takes longer to answer.
Healthcare makes the answer harder than it looks. The physician who uses a product may not control the budget. The patient who benefits from it may never see the invoice. A department chair may become the internal champion, while procurement, IT, finance, or a payer determines whether the company ever gets paid.
That is why I want founders to separate five roles early: the user, the beneficiary, the champion, the decision-maker, and the economic buyer. Sometimes one person or organization fills several roles. Often they do not.
When I was building my first company, we spent months pressure-testing the business model with payers. We would develop a model, take it to the people who understood the economics, hear why part of it did not work, and revise it. That process was not something we did after product development. It was part of product development.
Physicians can be especially vulnerable to skipping this work because the problem feels so obvious to us. We have seen it hundreds of times. We know the current workflow makes no sense. We may even know exactly what a better clinical experience should look like.
But a painful problem does not automatically create a buyer.
A health system might agree that a problem matters but have no budget assigned to it. A payer may have the strongest economic incentive even though the product lives inside a hospital workflow. A physician practice may love a tool but refuse to add another point solution. A patient may value the service but expect insurance to cover it.
You want to learn those things when your product is still cheap to change.
Start with conversations about the current process. Ask how the problem gets handled today, what it costs, who feels the consequences, and who has tried to solve it before. Ask what budget would fund a solution and what approvals a purchase would require. Ask what would make the organization say no.
Those conversations should change your product. If they do not, you may be listening only for confirmation.
I also encourage founders to distinguish enthusiasm from evidence. A physician saying, “I would use this,” is encouraging. A hospital leader introducing you to the person who owns the relevant budget is stronger. A buyer agreeing to a pilot is stronger still. Each step reduces a different kind of uncertainty.
This is not an argument for endless research before you build anything. A mockup, prototype, or manual version can make customer conversations far more productive because people respond better to something concrete. Build enough to create a useful discussion. Then let the discussion shape what comes next.
The question is not whether your idea deserves to exist. The question is whether you understand the path from a clinical problem to a repeatable purchase.
Next step: listen to “3 Things Physician Founders Must Know Before Launching a Product” →
