Digital Health Speak Guide

Joshua Liu, MD

Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD
LinkedIn: Joshua Liu
X: @joshuapliu
Co-host: The Digital Patient Podcast
Musings and Insights

“Digital Health speak”: a guide for startups to understand what hospitals and health systems REALLY mean…

Be warned: Some of these are 100% true and some of these are half-funny, half true. Let me know which bucket you think each of these falls into 😉

👻 “Great meeting you… sure, send me the materials and I’ll think about it”

= You probably won’t hear from me again. Your product doesn’t solve a problem that matters right now, but I won’t tell you that directly because I don’t want to hurt your feelings.

🎡”Send me a demo account so I can play with the product”

= I don’t know why I asked for this because I’m never going to actually login and try it

👨🏻‍💼”I’m the decision maker for this stuff in the organization”

= I’m not actually the decision maker… but if we buy your product, that’s more work for me that I don’t want to deal with… so I don’t want you talking to the decision maker.

💰 “This is too expensive”

= I don’t personally have the budget to pay for this… your solution might actually be “cheap” if you talk to the right budget holder.

👥 “Let’s schedule a meeting with the whole department”

= see you in 3 months

🔬“Let’s do it as a research study first to prove the value”

= I’d love to publish a paper about this… I don’t know if anyone else in our organization would truly care about this

👨‍💻“I’d be happy to be a consultant for you”

= I don’t think your product is valuable enough for us to buy, but it would be cool to work on it

💰”Unfortunately we can’t do this because then we’d have to do a RFP, which is too much work”

= this is really not an important problem for us to solve, but it’s easier for me to play the RFP card than hurt your feelings

What would you add to the list?

The Digital Patient

The Digital Patient takes an “edu-taining” approach to all things digital patient care. On this show hosts Dr. Joshua Liu, and Alan Sardana talk with healthcare, technology, and innovation leaders about the latest advancements in digital health, trends in digital transformation, and strategies for optimizing the patient experience.