I’m really frustrated seeing my startup waste investor funds. Two years ago, we secured initial funding to develop a patient management software for primary care physicians. We engaged a top-tier development team and invested $300k over a year and a half to create what they describe as a top-notch solution.
The app functions perfectly. It has no bugs, an attractive interface, integrates seamlessly with major electronic health records, and complies with all necessary regulations. Our developers are proud of their work.
However, doctors are not adopting it. We’ve presented it to more than 50 practices, and the responses are similar: “It doesn’t fit our workflow” or “too complex to use” or “we already have a system that works for us.”
It’s disheartening to see simpler apps with poor designs achieving success just by addressing a specific issue well.
I’m starting to feel like we created an app to impress ourselves rather than focusing on what physicians truly need. We got too wrapped up in technical sophistication and overlooked practical usability.
Your experience is exactly what I saw during five years in healthcare IT implementations. Here’s the brutal truth: physician practices run on razor-thin margins with crazy time pressure and constant staff turnover. Any workflow disruption costs them money they don’t have. What makes healthcare software succeed isn’t being technically amazing - it’s fixing the daily problems that drain their bank account. Insurance rejections, no-shows, prior auth nightmares - these hit their bottom line hard, and doctors definitely notice. That $300k lesson taught you what most healthcare startups never figure out. Doctors don’t care about feature lists - they want ROI in 30 days or less. Show them your solution cuts overhead or gets more patients through the door, period. I’d pivot to revenue cycle management or patient communication tools where you can prove financial impact fast. Healthcare practices will throw money at anything that fixes billing headaches or cuts admin work, even if it’s way simpler than what you originally built.
This hits home - I work in healthcare software too. Physician adoption has nothing to do with how good your tech is. It’s all about saving time.
Your app didn’t fail because of quality issues. It failed because onboarding was too hard. Doctors squeeze patients into 15-minute slots and won’t tolerate learning curves. A 30-minute training session? Forget it when you’re seeing 25 patients a day.
I’ve seen competitors win with worse products because they embedded sales teams in practices for two weeks. They sat right next to doctors and manually handled everything until it became second nature.
Here’s the kicker - your technical sophistication probably hurts you. Doctors want familiar tools, not impressive ones. They’ve spent years perfecting workflows and hate disruption.
Try this instead: find practices that already hate their current system. Offer to handle the entire transition for them. Skip the feature demos. Show them real time savings using actual patient scenarios from their practice. Make adoption automatic, not optional.
You nailed it - building for yourselves instead of users is huge in healthcare tech.
Your app quality isn’t the problem. You’re forcing doctors to change how they work instead of fitting into their existing workflow.
You need smart automation that bridges your app with their current processes. Don’t make doctors learn new systems - automatically sync data, pre-fill forms from their existing tools, and create seamless handoffs.
I’ve seen this crush it when you connect your app to whatever systems doctors already use. Automate patient data entry, scheduling, reports in formats they recognize.
Make your sophisticated app feel simple by handling complexity behind the scenes. Doctors don’t want to think about EHR integration - they want it working automatically.
This workflow automation turns technically perfect apps into something people actually use daily.
Check out https://latenode.com for building these bridges.
Ouch, this hits close to home - made the same mistakes with my SaaS. Doctors don’t want another system, they want their current headaches gone. Skip the feature pitch and shadow some docs for a full day instead. Watch where they get frustrated. You’ll probably find 3-4 small annoyances eating up their time that never come up in sales meetings.
Been through this exact mess with a fintech app a few years back. Blew ridiculous money on features nobody wanted.
Here’s what worked - we stopped selling the app and started solving one tiny problem really well. Doctors were wasting 15 minutes every morning checking which patients had appointments across different systems.
We built a simple dashboard showing today’s patients with basic info. Nothing fancy. Took 3 weeks instead of 18 months.
Practices started using it immediately because it saved real time on something they did daily.
Once they trusted us with that small thing, they adopted more features. But we had to earn trust by proving we understood their actual pain points.
Your $300k app isn’t dead. Break it into pieces. Find one thing doctors do daily that takes too long. Build just that part and make it stupid simple.
Stop thinking about what the app can do. Start thinking about what doctors need to do faster.