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.