The shift from analysis to pressure testing
Where most health care founders get stuck
Healthcare founders are an analytical group. We’ve been rewarded for getting things perfectly right for most of our career, and have been trained to do the best for the person in front of us, rather than imagine how to attract the next person into the chair.
Risk intolerance and analytical thinking can serve healthcare founders in some instances, especially when it comes to the actual product development. Risks in healthcare are high, and analysis can reduce friction in the patient or customer journey, ensure regulatory compliance and calculate billable hours to a T.
When risk intolerance and analysis make their way into marketing, product distribution and sales, healthcare founders fall into a trap that prevents them from ever pressure testing their own work and thoughtfulness to see just how successful their idea can be.
What is a pressure test?
Pressure testing in your business puts a higher-than-normal number of clients or new business into the system that you’ve built. It allows you to test your processes and SOPs in real time, with added pressure into the system to help expose leaks, friction or flat-out conversion issues with potential clients becoming actual clients. The most practical example of pressure testing in a health care business is increasing new patients accepted into a practice or group program to see how well the clinic, clinician and processes can stand up to higher volume. Typically, these new clients or leads are purchased (through advertising and marketing efforts) and put into the system that normally only serves organic traffic (such as referrals). Adding 20 or more new patients to a clinician’s business in a month can show process challenges such as:
The staff time it takes to onboard new clients and SOP adjustments that can reduce friction, back and forth and missed appointments.
The clinician time it takes to prepare charts, send follow-up notes or do patient research and help highlight where clinician support would unlock capability or more time.
The calendar pressures that exist when 20 new people are looking for follow-up appointments when one person is responsible for patient care, or the care delivery model is limiting (1:1, for example, versus group programs or asynchronous care).
Where many healthcare founders get stuck is in perpetual analysis and refinement of a process that has never been truly tested. Graduating 50 patients over 6 months through a system won’t teach you where it’s broken or where the true pressure lies. Founders need more data to understand their workflow and business limitations, but often circle around analysis and adjustments after too few patients without seeing the opportunity for a deep pressure test.
We can only imagine where a system or process in your business might break to a point. A true pressure test is necessary to help you understand the real capability of your business and the processes you’ve created.
At some point, more analysis stops reducing risk. It simply delays the opportunity to collect better evidence.
Healthcare founders are comfortable making decisions once they have enough data, but in business, the data we need often doesn't exist until we deliberately create the conditions to collect it. We need enough people moving through our marketing, onboarding, care delivery and follow-up systems to discover what actually happens when those systems are under pressure.
The goal of a pressure test isn't to prove that your system works. It's to find out where it doesn't.
For healthcare founders, that requires a different relationship with risk. We don't need to abandon the analytical thinking that makes us excellent clinicians. We need to recognize when analysis has done its job, and it's time to replace our assumptions with evidence.
Don't perfect a system that hasn't earned the right to be perfected. Pressure test it first.
