Elliot Cohen posits that the healthcare system is broken because it optimizes for financial relationships, not the patient. He argues the key metric should be Net Promoter Score—how much consumers love the experience. A system that people enjoy engaging with would inherently solve many cost and quality issues.
Related Insights
Founder Jesse Cole largely ignores financial meetings, focusing instead on metrics that directly impact fan experience. He obsessively tracks merchandise line wait times, game speed, and trick plays, believing that optimizing these customer-facing KPIs is the true driver of long-term financial success.
The medical community is slow to adopt advanced preventative tools like genomic sequencing. Change will not come from the top down. Instead, educated and savvy patients demanding these tests from their doctors will be the primary drivers of the necessary revolution in personalized healthcare.
Metrics like product utilization, ROI, or customer happiness (NPS) are often correlated with retention but don't cause it. Focusing on these proxies wastes energy. Instead, identify the one specific event (e.g., a team sending 2,000 Slack messages) that causally leads to non-churn.
To transform the complex healthcare industry, product leaders need three key skills. First, use first-principles thinking to deconstruct customer problems. Second, master storytelling to inspire change in large organizations, as data alone is insufficient. Third, evaluate performance on concrete financial, operational, and outcome-based metrics.
Kindbody's rapid, venture-backed expansion mirrored a tech startup's trajectory. However, this 'Silicon Valley style' disruption in a sensitive medical field like fertility care ultimately led to significant patient disillusionment, revealing a fundamental clash between a speed-focused business model and the requirements of trust-based medicine.
A competitive moat can be built by moving beyond simple service delivery (e.g., shipping medicine) to a closed-loop system. This involves diagnostics to establish a baseline, personalized treatment plans based on results, and ongoing re-testing to demonstrate improvement, creating a sticky user journey.
Truly customer-obsessed leaders don't delegate the definition of key metrics. Like Jeff Bezos specifying how to measure package delivery speed, they personally architect the measurement systems to ensure the entire organization optimizes for what customers actually value.
By aggregating millions of users, ZocDoc acts as a collective bargaining unit for patients. It uses its marketplace power to reward providers for patient-friendly behavior (e.g., price transparency, better hours) with better visibility, proving more effective at driving change than punitive government regulations.
The core issue preventing a patient-centric system is not a lack of technological capability but a fundamental misalignment of incentives and a deep-seated lack of trust between payers and providers. Until the data exists to change incentives, technological solutions will have limited impact.
To create transformational enterprise solutions, focus on the core problems of the key buyers, not just the feature requests of technical users. For healthcare payers, this meant solving strategic issues like care management and risk management, which led to stickier, higher-value products than simply delivering another tool.