I used to think the hard part of health tech was building something that works. It's not. The hard part is getting anyone to use it.
The pattern is almost always the same. A team builds a genuinely good product — better scheduling, smarter alerts, cleaner data. They demo it. Clinicians nod. The pilot goes well. And then nothing happens. The contract stalls. The champion leaves. The hospital defaults back to the old way.
This isn't a technology problem. It's a workflow problem. Hospitals are not broken systems waiting for a fix. They're deeply optimized systems where every inefficiency exists for a reason someone can explain. That workaround in the EHR? A nurse figured it out six years ago and trained everyone else. That redundant paper form? It exists because the last software migration lost data.
When you walk in with a product that requires people to change how they work, you're not offering an upgrade. You're asking them to take a risk — with patient safety, with their time, with their already-stretched team. And for most health tech companies, the pitch is "trust us, it's better." That's not enough.
The founders I see winning in this space don't lead with features. They lead with integration. They ask: how do I fit into what already happens, with zero disruption on day one? They earn the right to change workflows later by first proving they won't break anything now.
The technology is rarely what kills health tech startups. It's the assumption that a better tool automatically earns adoption. It doesn't. Adoption is earned one workflow at a time.