If you’re building in health tech, there’s a good chance you’ve already run into the industry’s biggest trap: the person who loves your product is rarely the one who buys it.
In most SaaS sales cycles, the user and the buyer sit pretty close together. Sometimes they’re even the same person, making it easier to create and pitch products to people who want (and need them).
This is rarely the case in health tech, where clinicians don’t have the budget or buying authority to be key decision makers. It’s a chasm that kills startups. Not because the product was bad, but because the founder built it for the wrong person.
Unfortunately, your patient-facing app can delight users and doctors in equal measure, but if it’s not solving a financial, compliance, or workflow problem for the actual buyer, nobody will pay for it.
Bridging the gap between the end users and ICP is key.
In this blog, we’ll outline the strategic difference between ‘user’ and ‘buyer’, cover the four core buying profiles in healthcare, and provide a framework for ICPs for health tech founders, so you can bridge the gap to pitch to the right people.
The health tech conundrum: users vs. buyers
First up, let’s define the terms clearly.
In healthcare, the user is the human interacting with your product, such as the clinician, the nurse, the admin operator, or the patient tapping through your app.
Your ideal customer profile (ICP), however, is the entity or organization signing the contract for the product or service and assuming all the financial risk, like a hospital or insurance company.
What makes it such a conundrum is that in healthcare, users and buyers are not interchangeable roles; they rarely overlap at all, which can create a big disconnect.
When you start a health tech company, your instinct is probably to talk to clinicians. They’re the ones who understand the problem and use the tools, and are more likely to be excited about something new that makes their work-life easier.
Unfortunately, this is a trap that leads founders astray.
The fatal flaw
Many early founders often say:
- “The doctor loves it—that means the hospital will buy it.”
- “Patients will pay for this out of pocket.”
- “Clinicians will champion this for us internally.”
This is all great feedback, it’s encouraging, but it holds no real commercial value unless the buyer’s incentives align with it as well.
Healthcare is governed by what many outside the industry might perceive as the ‘boring stuff’. Things like:
- Regulations
- Budgets
- Risk management
- Integration requirements
- Workflows
- Quality metrics
These are the things that matter to the entity paying for the product.
The strategic necessity
To succeed, then, founders have to move away from building for the person using the product. At least for now. You have to craft and iterate for those paying for it.
That means, compliance coming first; ‘integration planning’ and making sure your product plugs into the systems buyers use being a priority; ROI and security being built into everything you do from the get-go.
The good news is that payers are on the hunt for secure, new tech that works. Two-thirds cited ‘legacy technology’ as one of their top three pain points in a study by Bain & Company.
Deconstructing the healthcare buying ecosystem (the four p’s)
Payers are one of the four P’s, the four major purchasing entities in healthcare. Pretty much every contract, every pilot, and every long-term deal flows through one of these.
Let’s break them down, starting with providers.
1. Providers (hospitals, clinics, IDNs)
As we’ve established, “customers” are not the clinicians using the product; they are much higher up the chain: the CIO, CFO, VP of operations, or Head of clinical informatics. They don’t buy tools because they like them; they are driven by three main factors: to save money, to save time, and to reduce risk.
Their buying triggers include:
- Improving clinical efficiency—taking a minute off workflows here and there adds up fast.
- Reducing staff burnout—a huge problem, even a crisis in modern healthcare.
- Optimizing revenue cycle management (RCM)—’cleaner’ claims and fewer denials mean money comes in faster.
- Increasing patient throughput—more patients seen equals more revenue.
- Integrating with Epic or Cerner—can be the hill your deal lives or dies on.
Again, it all goes back to cost savings, buying time, and risk reduction. Most of the time, everything else is just noise for providers.
2. Payers (insurance companies, Medicare/Medicaid
Most providers are balancing workflows with costs. For payers, it’s generally weighted much more to the latter. They’re making decisions based on billions of dollars in claims. They want to hear the math behind your pitch, first and foremost.
The buyer here is the CMO, the VP of utilization management, or the actuarial team.
What gets their attention:
- Reducing utilization costs—unnecessary ER visits, duplicate tests.
- Improving quality scores (e.g., STAR ratings)—better scores mean better reimbursement.
- Preventing high-cost claims—a single missed case can cost six figures.
- Reducing readmission rates—this ties directly to reimbursement.
- Managing chronic disease populations—lowers long-term spend.
You’ll need to quantify impact with payers. They’ll want measurable, accurate cost savings for any deal to move forward.
3. Employers (self-insured corporations)
Employers are the ‘stealth’ buyers of the health tech world, and are often the fastest to close. In the US, most larger employers are self-insured, meaning they directly pay the healthcare claims of their workforce. That means every illness and absence hits their balance sheet.
The users are employees, but your buyer here is the VP of HR, benefits director, or CFO.
Employers buy solutions that:
- Reduce insurance claims—arguably the biggest cost drivers
- Lower absenteeism—fewer sick days means higher productivity
- Improve employee satisfaction—wellness is a retention tool.
- Reduce turnover—replacing staff is expensive.
If you can show even modest reductions in claims or spikes in productivity, you might be onto a winner. Employers can buy quickly as their committees are often smaller with clearer incentives.
4. Pharma/life sciences
The final four p is pharma. It’s quite different from the rest, though, as it’s heavily regulated and fuelled by big data. Your real buyers here are the VP of clinical trials or the head of patient engagement.
Pharma teams tend to care about:
- Improved clinical trial recruitment—a bottleneck across the industry.
- Higher adherence—missed doses ruin trial data.
- Real-world evidence (RWE)—data to prove safety and efficacy.
- Better patient engagement—especially in long-term or centralized trials.
- Lower trial drop-off rates—fewer withdrawals mean faster approvals.
If you can help pharma collect cleaner data, engage participants more reliably, or speed up trial timelines even slightly, you’re on the way to unlocking an incredibly lucrative market in health tech.
Pharma budgets are enormous, and they’re always looking for solutions that give them an edge, though there is the caveat of rules and scrutiny being much higher/tighter.
Building the buyer-centric ICP framework
Now we’ve got a handle on the entities that are buying health tech, the next step is identifying which group your buyer is in and building your ICP and product accordingly.
Here’s the framework founders should use.
Step 1. Define the ROI metric (the buyer’s currency)
Before you start thinking about all the technical stuff, you need to answer one question:
“What’s the business result my buyer gets from paying for this?”
In health tech, you need to pitch the math instead of inspiration and hopeful messages. It’s not that buyers don’t care about healthier patients or happier clinicians. They do. It just isn’t tangible, something that drives value in itself.
That’s why you need to front up with a quantifiable economic return for the buyer. Here’s what that could look like:
- Hospitals—revenue flow, operational efficiency, staffing relief (anything that improves workflow and cuts overtime)
- Payers—lowering long-term spend, improving quality metrics tied to reimbursement
- Employers—better productivity, more attractive benefits packages
- Pharma—faster trial recruitment, higher adherence rates
It needs to be articulated well, too, to have an impact. A pitch like, “our solution improves patient engagement” is likely to make investors’ eyes glaze over.
Instead, you can reframe it with detail, like:
“Our solution reduces no-shows by 22%, saving $1.8 million in lost revenue per year across your patient clinics.”
It’s instantly more impactful, framed around ROI that the buyer will care about. Getting all that in one sentence is the aim.
Step 2. Map the buying committee
In healthcare, there are rarely all-seeing, single decision makers. It’s multi-layered, with several people involved. A bit like getting a bill through Congress (but hopefully not as long-winded), where different committees review it and sign off on it before things move forward.
You’ll have to win over:
- The economic buyer—controls the budget/money.
- The technical buyer—checks compliance, how it’ll integrate into existing systems, and the impact on data security.
- The clinical champion—validates how useful it is in real-world clinical settings.
Again, most founders only talk to the clinical champion. That’s why sales cycles get stuck in a rut and never move. A deal only happens when the economic buyer commits, and the technical buyer signs off.
Step 3. Build your product’s ‘front door’ for the buyer
The shift from the end-user to buyer also requires a shift in mindset for your MVP roadmap. Usually, you might think about building the user interface first, such as the clinician dashboard or scheduling flow.
However, the buyer doesn’t really care about those. What they really want to know is if the product can fit into theirsystem without breaking anything.
That means your MVP must prioritize:
- Compliance features
- Audit logs
- SSO (Single Sign-On)
- Role-based permissions
- Basic EHR integration points
- Reporting dashboards
- Admin controls
This is the “front door” that buyers walk through. If you can’t show it in your MVP, you’ll have a tough time getting the deal to progress.
Step 4. Navigate regulatory hurdles (the cost of entry)
Finally, healthcare compliance isn’t something you can bolt on at the end, as a sort of afterthought. In some industries, you might get away with “we’ll tighten security later”, or “we’ll sort the paperwork when we scale.” Not in healthcare. Buyers won’t even look at the product unless you’ve handled these regulatory basics.
This is an area where founders can get blind sided. They often underestimate the regulatory impact.
Before you start getting into a serious sales conversation, you’ll need to think about:
- HIPAA—baseline protection for patient data in the US
- SOC 2—proof that your security controls aren’t just vibes
- HITRUST—often required for large hospital systems and insurers
- GDPR—if you have EU users (or might in the future)
- ISO27001—increasingly a must-have for enterprise credibility
- Data retention and deletion policies—because buyers want to know exactly what happens to protected health information(PHI)
- Security review documentation—procurement will ask, and you need something real to show them
Looking at all those can feel like a checklist, but compliance should be built into the product. It’s one of the strongest signals that it’s safe to buy and use.
Conclusion and strategic next steps with except friday
Breaking into health tech is harder than most industries because the commercial logic doesn’t map neatly to user enthusiasm. You can build something clinicians love, and patients rave about, but it can all fall down if your ICP doesn’t demonstrate:
- Clear financial value
- Integration simplicity
- Compliance readiness
Come up short on just one of these things, and the product is very unlikely to be adopted. That’s why you need to follow up your great clinical idea with a sharp commercial strategy.
You can start doing this today by solving the systematic and financial problems of the buyer. The user will still be there, helping you to refine your product later, but for now, you need to switch gears.
At exceptfriday, we specialize in helping founders build buyer-ready, compliant, B2B health tech MVPs that pass procurements and win over buying committees from day one.
If you want to build a product that gets purchased, we can help. Book a discovery session with us, and let’s define your true ICP; the one that will carry your startup from idea to revenue.
