Closing the clinical ROI gap in HealthTech

That was the theme at the latest Hash It Out event, hosted by Hale House Members, Medic Footprints and The Medical Consulting Group, which brought together founders, clinicians and operators to examine how clinical expertise can strengthen both patient outcomes and commercial traction.

The shift from clinical input to clinical value

Brian Snyder of Aide Health identified three distinct ways companies require clinical contributions: credibility and signalling, domain expertise that validates product fit, and practical guardrails for regulatory and clinical safety. The problem, he argued, is that companies routinely blur all three into a single advisory function – even though each requires different expertise.

Simon Lucas of Uphill Health echoed this, noting that clinical reality extends well beyond doctors. Bringing in pharmacists, insurers and frontline professionals before code is written reduces costly wrong turns later.

Katie Baker, Chief Medical Officer at Tandem Health, and Dr Dan Mullarkey, VP Medical at Skin Analytics,  agreed that deploying clinicians as a credibility signal or final checkpoint leaves most of the value untapped. The real return comes from integrating clinical thinking into product design, workflow adoption, evidence generation and the edge cases that only become visible to those who have actually delivered care.

The consequences of getting it wrong

Simon described how over-reliance on a single opinion can be costly  in both time and financial resources – a biomarker focus chosen on the basis of a key opinion leader’s preference, later found to carry little weight across the wider specialty. He argued that situations like this are avoidable when clinical input is treated as a system rather than a single voice.