“The digital health ecosystem has been missing a place where SMEs and corporates can meet”
By Aline Noizet, Edito Solution Match Service leader at eHealth HUB
More and more hospitals and corporates are collaborating with SMEs to develop and offer more competitive services or improve internal processes. Conservative industries like pharmaceutical groups or insurance companies understand that digital is the future and they have to embrace it if they want to stay competitive. Many of them choose to do it by collaborating with SMEs.
One of the main challenges for corporates or hospitals is to know where to look for those SMEs. Some of them don’t even have time or resources to scout the market and often use Google. Their goal is not just to find a startup but they want access to the best ones, whose solutions are matching the requirements they are looking for.
From the SME point of view, the challenges are on one hand to find the right person in the institutions: Hospitals, pharma or insurance companies are complex institutions, with many departments and layers. And on the other hand, to know what those companies are looking for and when, to approach them at the right moment with the right proposal.
On one side, we have innovative startups with cutting-edge digital health solutions looking for customers. On the other side, we have hospitals or pharma or insurances looking at digitalizing their offer.
The digital health ecosystem has been missing a place where SMEs and corporates can meet to overcome the challenges mentioned previously. That’s where services like eHealth HUB’s Solution Match make sense.
First of all, because it serves as a filter between corporates and SMEs, translating what the hospital or company is looking for into a concrete need and solution requirements, in a way that makes sense for SMEs and increases the chances of finding the best matches.
It also helps to speed up the whole process with an initial commitment from the hospital or company and a scouting period and selection deadline fixed at the beginning of the whole process (around 5 months). This helps overcome the difference of speed between corporates and SMEs by setting expectations at the beginning and following up with both sides along the way.
Through a service like Solution Match, the hospital or company gets to meet in person the best SMEs based on their criteria, helping them to focus their efforts and speed up potential collaboration. Those events where hospitals or companies meet in person with the SMEs are also a perfect opportunity for the SMEs to have better insights and understanding about the client and the solution they are looking for, enabling them to fine-tune and personalize even more their proposal.
According to Manuel Clavel, CEO of Hospital Bernal, services like Solution Match ‘exponentially increases chances of success in finding the solution(s) that matches what we are looking for, as it gives us a reach, in term of quality and geography of SMEs that we would never have reached to on our own otherwise. It’s also very productive in terms of duration of the whole process (4 to 5 months) and supports to define our requirements’.
AXA used Solution Match services to find solutions that would support their strategy. What they find useful with this service is that it let them focus on the strategic fit with their overall strategy, by focusing only on top companies pre-selected by eHealth hub based on their own criteria. They are currently in serious discussions with some of the SMEs that pitched in front of them and ready to take the collaboration with them to the next level.
‘We were really impressed by the quality of the presentations. The SMEs really embraced our vision and strategy in their offering. We saw great potential for future collaboration’, AXA people say.
Services like Solution Match are a great way to turn procurement into success but it’s essential for the hospital or companies to have a clear idea of what they are looking for, not only in terms of requirements but also the type of business model they want to engage into, as well as sharing information about their vision and what they want to achieve. The more information they can provide to applying SMEs, the higher the chances of finding the best matches in a timely way.
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