How to Build a Medical Startup: The Ultimate Guide

There’s no doubt that the demand for tech-enabled and digitally-focused healthcare and medicine is growing at a fast pace. In 2021 alone, there was a huge increase in the number of medical and health startups, and this number is bound to increase in the coming years.

According to Precedence Research, the global digital health market is expected to be worth $551.09 billion by 2027. These numbers prove that the medical sector is among the most funded and rapidly growing industries.

That said, in practice, the medical industry is one of the toughest areas for launching a startup due to factors such as high-security standards, strict legal rules, and more. Therefore, in order to succeed, you need to understand how to launch healthcare tech startups in the current landscape.

In this medical startup guide, we will answer how to build a healthcare startup and how you can take your business to the next level with ease.

Key Steps to Build a Medical Startup

In this section, we will be discussing the key steps to build a startup in the healthcare sector and how you can step into the medical world without any hassle -

Step 1: Create a business plan and budget

The first step in this guide to build a healthcare startup is to create a business plan and budget. While you may already have a fantastic idea for your healthcare startup, you first need to draw up a business plan and a reasonable budget. As you create your plan and budget, you will have time to think about your marketing, operations, and design approach. You should also consider how you will obtain and spend your startup capital.

When working on your business plan, think about how you can put your client’s health first. You will want to focus on improving patient access to healthcare services. This will make it easier for patients to engage in preventive care and streamline physician workflow so that they can help patients more efficiently.

Step 2: Choose your medical advisory board

The next step to consider when planning to build a medical startup is choosing your medical advisory board. Working with the right people on your medical advisory board can make a world of difference in the success of your startup. If you choose people who know the ins and outs of this market and have extensive experience working in this industry, you will be able to benefit from their expert guidance. Building a fantastic team starts with your advisory board, so you want to choose your members carefully.

Step 3: Ensure HIPAA compliance

If your medical startup companies offer online billing services, you will need to comply with all the legal standards required by HIPAA. In case you fail to ensure that your medical startup is HIPAA compliant, you risk facing legal action. In addition, potential clients are unlikely to place their trust in a company that does not prioritize HIPAA. They need to know that you take their privacy concerns seriously.

Step 4: Choose a team with the right competencies

If you have never worked with development teams before, keep in mind that you will need more than developers when planning to build a medical startup. Your healthcare startup would require QA engineers, UX/UI designers, and DevOps specialists.

Step 5: Start with an MVP

Before opting for full-scale development, you should test your idea and features, and functionalities with a minimum viable product. An MVP is a simplified version of your product with basic functionalities. Focus on the critical functionality such as features that would solve the pain points of your target audience. Everything else can wait until subsequent releases.

For instance, if you are building a telehealth platform for your hospital, the core functionalities of your MVP would include appointment management, video and audio conferencing, and user registration. After adding the core features, you can add or integrate APIs for other software.

Step 6: Choose the revenue model

If you are planning to launch your startup in the healthcare sector, you can either go with a one-time license fee or with a subscription-based model. One-time payments are more suitable for wearables, remote patient monitoring tools, and direct-to-patient services. Meanwhile, cloud-based software providers usually stick to recurring payments because they can convert more people with lower initial fees.

Most subscription-based services use one of the following price models -

• Flat rate pricing: Users get complete functionality for a fixed recurring price.
• Freemium: Some features are available for free, but to use the key functionalities, a certain amount needs to be paid.
• Pay-as-you-go pricing: The price scales depending on the usage metrics per customer.
• Per-user pricing: You charge based on the number of active users per count.

Try to find the balance between your costs and value for your target audience. Experimenting with your strategies wouldn’t hurt as well.

Step 7: Promote your product before the release

Start showing your healthcare business solutions to your primary audience before releasing it. Your product should also resonate with the gatekeepers of the industry — the government and insurance companies.

As innovative technologies are harder to promote in the medical community, you should be ready to back up your product with scientific research. Additionally, you must be willing to put your findings through peer reviews and randomized controlled trials to make them more credible.

Step 8: Develop and release a full product

Analyze and collect the feedback you got after launching your MVP and have your developers modify the technical specifications before full-scale development. It’s advisable to build your application with scale in mind. For this, you can use cloud-based infrastructures that allow you to adjust storage and computing resources based on your needs.

You can also adopt a microservices architecture or a modular monolithic architecture that divides your software modules into loosely coupled independent modules. This will help ensure that your system’s features don’t depend on other components, so you can easily upgrade modules without disrupting the whole system. Plus, it will also help you enhance your software with out-of-the-box APIs.

Wrapping up!

Launching a startup in healthcare requires in-depth research, business planning, and promotion. But, most importantly, you should create a valuable solution that addresses a real market demand. The steps mentioned above will help you in launching your health tech companies without any hassle and help you determine what factors are important to determine the success of your business. You can also take help of top-notch healthcare mobile app development companies to launch your own startup and climb the ladder of success.