The HealthTech and AI ecosystem is buzzing with potential, promising efficiency gains, personalization, and improved accessibility. Faced with technological advancements, it’s tempting to model healthcare like any other sector, based on segments, big data, and standardized pathways.
Yet, at the heart of medicine lies a fundamentally different reality: the encounter with an individual, a human being.
Unlike public health, which operates on a large scale, clinical medicine is practiced on the ground, one patient at a time. When a doctor sees someone, they aren’t just a data point or a member of a predefined segment. You don’t know the exact time to diagnosis beforehand, nor the length of the path to recovery. Each person is unique, with their own story, complexity, fears, and fragilities.
This human richness and unpredictability are at the core of medical art, but they constitute a major challenge for traditional economic models and business plans. How do you quantify empathy? How do you standardize the trust a patient places in their caregiver? How do you integrate the weight of suffering or the vertigo of a potential pathology – which most people only know from a distance – into a spreadsheet?
For a passionate doctor with an innovative idea, keen to preserve this essential human dimension while building a viable solution, seeking investors can lead to misunderstanding. The traditional metrics of scalability and return on investment, so valued by financiers, seem ill-suited to this complex reality.
Herein lies the challenge… and the opportunity.
Stating that accounting for the human element makes the economic model difficult is not naive; it’s a clear-eyed observation from the field. But it is not a dead end.
On the contrary, we are convinced that it is entirely feasible to build HealthTech startups and solutions that profoundly respect and integrate this human dimension. And, far from decreasing the potential return on investment (ROI), this ROI will be all the more significant because these human elements have been seriously considered.
Why? Because
✅ Better Clinical Outcomes
Empathy, trust, and a deep understanding of the patient lead to better treatment adherence, better follow-up, and ultimately, better health outcomes. This is immense value, measurable over time.
🤝 Retention and Engagement
A patient who feels understood and respected is an engaged, more loyal patient. In an evolving healthcare ecosystem, the trusting relationship becomes a major asset.
💡 Relevant Solutions
Understanding the depth and complexity of the patient experience allows for the development of tools and services that really meet needs, beyond superficial symptoms. This is key to a relevant product/market fit.
🔬 Facilitate Clinical Trials
Very pragmatically, taking the human into account from the design stage allows for greatly facilitating clinical trials, which often represent a major bottleneck and a significant cost in the development of new therapies. Patient engagement and retention are crucial for trial success.
💎 Differentiation and Reputation
A startup that places the human at the heart of its value proposition strongly differentiates itself and builds a reputation for trust, a valuable intangible asset.
Certainly, this requires looking beyond very short-term financial indicators and integrating metrics of « human value » and health outcomes into economic models. It requires mutual understanding between the clinical world and the financial world.
The future of HealthTech is not in the simple replacement of humans by machines, but in an intelligent integration where technology enhances caregivers’ abilities and improves patients’ experience, while preserving – or even strengthening – the human relationship and understanding that are at the core of effective and compassionate medicine.
Investing in HealthTech is also investing in the human. And therein lies, without any naivety, the promise of an ROI that is not only financial, but also societal and human – the only one that truly makes sense in healthcare.
