To put up a business in a healthcare setting has never been easy. A lot of factors need to be considered such as funds, connections, networks, advertising to the right market, and a solid business strategy. In digital healthcare, you have to impress a variety of stakeholders and private investors but you also don’t want to miss the government sector since healthcare is being regulated by the state. It is indeed a challenging endeavor that could lead to possible failure and that is inevitable in any startup. It is crucial in a pioneering health care start-up to commit mistakes, hence, this article was written to enlighten entrepreneurs on what to avoid and see their startup succeed. 

1. Avoid exclusivity – the heart of the healthcare business is the patient. You wouldn’t want your patient to be pissed off and hanging with so many questions leaving you and finding other solutions to their health needs. Always be approachable and inclusive of all the needs of the patient. Digital health innovations are good and solve a lot of issues but if you don’t have patients, it defeats the purpose of being innovative and your product may fail. Start with the basics which are taking care and understanding the needs of your patient in order to come up with valuable healthcare ideas.
2. Do not deal with health care providers too much – dealing with third-party care providers means a lot more investors to convince, a lot more ideas to convey which also means a lot of money to spend. You may now have to think about the insurer, the medical companies, and the healthcare workers alongside the patient. Too many things that will preoccupy your business mind will lose your focus. It’s not at all bad to get in touch with them once in a while because they also serve as the main ingredient in your healthcare business but to depend on them all the time is a different story.
3. Avoid misunderstanding payments and reimbursements – it is always essential to distinguish who will pay for the patient and how much is going to be reimbursed. More often, product pricing without researching the cost of goods and the reimbursement and payment can fail a startup company. Your aim in starting a business is to earn and not to lose revenue. There should be no boundaries when it comes to understanding the payers and other customers. 
4. Do not invest too much money and effort into pilot programs – for startup companies, having pilot programs is very important not until you run out of funds to support them. There is no guarantee that a pilot program can give so much profit and commercial stability.  For a healthcare startup with a lot of employees, one pilot program can consume the time of the entire team. Do not go beyond your means in running pilot programs. There can be several ways to keep you in the budget while doing pilot programs.  Let’s say you want to run a pilot testing on becoming fit and healthy, there are several health and wellness apps that basically use mobile phones to boost natural strength and inner beauty. In this case, you save a lot of time in advertising and a lot of money in promoting. 
5. Not interested in going digital – while other health companies focus on promoting new products, some are just about taking care of their patients directly. The use of pen and paper in managing admin tasks was changed to word processing applications and excel files and many healthcare companies are open to digital transformation. Being digital is not just having a fundamental approach in serving patients but also building a new framework from scratch. Let’s say we now have so much software where patient information is stored, these were not designed to be merely the storage of records but to also secure and allow organizations to abide by the law. The outcome of digitized effort can lead to a profitable and sustainable healthcare business. For instance, you are to introduce a certain brand of skincare or skin product, of course, you can just hire models to promote it in the market but you may also want to consider an AI technology that focuses more on understanding and listening to the consumer’s needs before the product itself. The kind of approach in using this technology is a mirror of going digital because of the apps that will be used to conduct surveys and questions to the consumers before letting them use the skin care product.

A remarkably basic issue that causes most startups to fail is the lack of support systems in a certain management team. Lesser knowledge in running the healthcare business is also the main factor. Health startups may not succeed most of the time but you can save yourself from falling into the pit of failure by avoiding the mistakes presented in this article.