Navigating HSES barriers to adoption
The 67 questions to answer before starting a company that sells software to hospitals.
This guide covers practical issues such as
Marketing
The early days of lead gen
Sales Pipeline Management
GTM Hiring
Bottom of Funnel Sales
Pilots vs Trial Periods
Read the guide we've been providing to our own portfolio companies.
A must-read
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Picture this: you’re an HSES* company ready to take over the world.
Then, you make an avoidable mistake in your go-to-market strategy, and suddenly you’re spinning your wheels for 3-6 months.
We’ve been there.
*HSES = Health System Enterprise SaaS
Hard earned lessons from the trenches
Written by a founder for founders: this guide provides practical, tactical sales and marketing advice for navigating the complexities of selling to hospitals that we learned the hard way.
As a VC, LionBird has invested in some great HSES companies.
We also built a couple ourselves, and so we know how difficult your journey is.
Contributing our unique combination of experience, network, and tools, we help exceptional founders lay the best foundations for their companies to scale and succeed.
This is not a "sales playbook"
By narrowly focusing on the specific challenge of selling to health systems we aimed to go deeper.
The focus is on the scrappy early days of founder-led marketing, sales and customer success, before the systems for scaling are in place.
We created this because we couldn’t find anything like it when we started, and we want to help the next HSES entrepreneurs.
Learn how to grow from one hospital customer to hundreds
About the Authors
Robert Lord
Before joining LionBird as a Partner, Robert co-founded Protenus, a healthcare compliance analytics company from LionBird’s second fund, named the 2022 KLAS Category Leader in Patient Privacy Monitoring and Drug Diversion.
Robert is a featured thought leader in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Baltimore Sun, among others, and was named to the Baltimore Business Journal’s “Tech 10” and Becker’s Hospital Review’s “Healthcare Entrepreneurs to Know.”
At LionBird, he serves on the board of HSES companies such Protenus, Phrase Health and Chiefy.
Peter Pronovost
Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, is a world-renowned patient safety champion, physician executive, critical care physician, prolific researcher with more than 1000 peer-reviewed publications, an innovator who has founded several technology companies, and a thought leader informing U.S. and global health policy.
Dr. Pronovost’s transformative work leveraging checklists to reduce central line-associated bloodstream infections has saved thousands of lives and earned him national acclaim.
This life-saving intervention has been implemented across the U.S., and as a result, central line-associated infections that used to kill as many people as breast or prostate cancer have been reduced by 80 percent.
Dr. Pronovost’s transformative work leveraging checklists to reduce central line-associated bloodstream infections has saved thousands of lives and earned him national acclaim. This life-saving intervention has been implemented across the U.S., and as a result, central line-associated infections that used to kill as many people as breast or prostate cancer have been reduced by 80 percent. In recognition of this innovation, his highest-profile accolades include being named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine and receiving a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
While serving as Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at University Hospitals Health System in Cleveland and as a Professor in the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Management at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Pronovost developed a checklist to make visible defects in value and deployed a management and accountability system to eliminate those defects. This system reduced the annual cost of care for Medicare patients by 30% over three years while improving quality. In 2022, Dr. Pronovost lead the efforts that culminated in University Hospitals winning the American Hospital Association’s Quest for Quality award, the industry’s most prestigious honor recognizing its member organizations for their commitment to quality. He was named the Veale Distinguished Chair in Leadership and Clinical Transformation in 2023.
Along with the deputy secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Dr. Pronovost co-chaired the Healthcare Quality Summit, an initiative created in response to President Donald Trump’s White House Executive Order to modernize and improve quality measures for HHS, Veterans Affairs, and Department of Defense.
Dr. Pronovost previously served as Johns Hopkins Medicine Senior Vice President for Patient Safety and Quality and was the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. He also served as the Senior Vice President for Clinical Strategy and Chief Medical Officer for UnitedHealthcare. Dr. Pronovost also serves as a member of the Presidents Council for Science and Technology Patient Safety Working Group that is producing recommendations for improving safety to President Joseph Biden.
Dr. Pronovost was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2011, to the American Academy of Nursing, and has received multiple honorary degrees. He is an advisor to the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety and regularly addresses the U.S. Congress on patient safety issues. He is a founder of VisICU, a tele ICU company purchased by Philips;, and Doctella, a health information platform for remote patient monitoring purchased by Masimo. He is a strategic advisor for several health care technology and venture capital companies. Today, he is known as one of the most influential executives and physician leaders in health care and one of the Top 25 innovators in health care.
LionBird is a venture capital firm investing exclusively in pre-scale digital health companies.
Since its inception, the firm has invested in more than 35+ founding teams and now has over $150 million in AUM. Our focus is on helping founders lay the best foundations for their companies to scale and succeed.
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