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Healthcare innovation is in nascency in India and founders face the daunting task of crafting pioneering solutions that resonate with multiple stakeholders (hospitals, insurance companies, patients, pharmacists and regulators). This challenge is particularly pronounced in India, where they must navigate a unique set of cultural, economic, and infrastructural roadblocks too.

Where do healthcare founders come from?

There are many different paths leading startup founders to healthcare:

Most founders start with personal experiences in healthcare either as a patient or a caregiver and are exasperated with the way patients are treated and thus want to change the way how healthcare is delivered.

Some have worked in the healthcare industry in legacy institutions (hospitals, pharma, consulting) in or in the ‘first wave’ of healthcare start-ups in India (e.g., e-pharmacies, telemedicine companies) and want to use the learnings to provide better solutions.

A new breed of founders come from the technology background where they have witnessed success as early team members (now VPs or CXO-1s) and understand the value creation opportunity that India has to offer.

Finally, there are logical, framework-driven individuals with entrepreneurial zeal who arrive at healthcare through a careful analysis of which industry is ripe for disruption.

These diverse backgrounds and experiences motivate founders to learn the intricacies and pain points of healthcare systems. Founders use first principle thinking, rely on patient insights and are open to learn from mistakes and pivot as they scale.

Identifying and validating the problem

Regardless of their backgrounds, successful founders have an analytical mindset to validate the magnitude of their chosen problem statement by assessing its size, scalability, uniqueness, and growth potential within a defined timeframe and resources.

For patient-side validation, good founders conduct careful, empathetic patient interviews, and go the extra mile by actively participating in real patient experiences. This hands-on approach ensures a comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by patients, enriching the solutions developed.

To gain validation from the healthcare practitioner perspectives, founders usually engage in in-depth discussions with doctors to understand their clinical and administrative workflows and routines. This perspective extends beyond physicians to include paramedics and non-medical staff, thereby creating a holistic understanding of the healthcare ecosystem. This also allows founders to get early feedback on the clinical solution that they want to build and the role that physicians can play – medical advisor, affiliate distribution channel or a champion stakeholder!

By incorporating diverse perspectives, founders ensure their solution can address the spectrum of healthcare stakeholders.

Crafting innovative solutions

 A great starting point for effective solutions involves mapping each solution component on a detailed, granular, and multi-stakeholder patient journey, and demonstrating (or personally verifying) how the solution helps save time and cost and improve quality of care for patients.

It is critical for a founder to wear a black thinking-hat during solutioning, considering how different stakeholders might resist the proposed solutions. This involves creating detailed questionnaires for various personas to identify potential drawbacks and refine the solution accordingly. This approach helps identify how the solutions will be evaluated by all stakeholders and will minimize change resistance.

It also helps for founders to study (within context) global innovation in the identified problem space and draw inspiration from successful models (post contextualizing for India). For example: founders of Nivaan identified the large problem of musculoskeletal pain and identified the gap that multi-disciplinary consults were missing. But when contextualized to India, they realized that a digital only solution would not help, and clinics would have to be a part of the solution.

Building the right team

To build a successful startup, it’s crucial to assemble a complementary team, with co-founders and early team members whose skills align like a piece of jigsaw. It’s useful to create a competency matrix that documents all therapy-specific and business function-specific skills (growth, marketing, clinical operations, etc.) and then clearly mark the key strengths of the co-founders and potential team members. This can then be used to hire according to the evident organizational gaps and create a well-rounded team. Purpose is key when building in healthcare and thus it is important to get a team that is mission-aligned so that the pack sticks together on the good and bad days of start-up building.

It would be ideal to keep the number of key employees between 5-10 till the company achieves product-market fit. This helps with agility, faster pivoting, and controlled burn.

To sum up, establishing and sustaining a healthcare startup in India demands strategic acumen, and also involves navigating mental, emotional, and financial challenges. From all the rapid development we see, we are convinced this is India’s decade to transform healthcare within the country and globally.

Dr. Pankaj Jethwani, Executive VP & Partner- W Health Ventures & CEO- 2070 Health and Namit Chugh, Principal- W Health Ventures