Health IT vendors build products based on idealized workflow demos, but real clinical workflows break down under pressure (3am, short-staffed, workarounds). Vendors lack authentic frontline insight, leading to poor product-market fit.
Recruit current clinical staff to document real workflows (video, annotated screenshots, shift diaries) anonymized and structured into a searchable library. Vendors subscribe to access ground-truth workflow data segmented by department, EHR, hospital size.
subscription — tiered access for vendors; per-report pricing for one-off research; contributors get paid per submission
The pain signal is validated and structural. Health IT vendors consistently build products against idealized workflows, then face poor adoption when real-world use diverges wildly. The Reddit thread and broader industry discourse confirm this is a known, persistent problem. Vendors currently rely on customer advisory boards (biased toward power users), sales demos (idealized), and surveys (self-reported). The gap between 'demo workflow' and '3am short-staffed workflow' is real, costly, and well-documented in health informatics literature. Deducting 2 points because vendors have survived with imperfect data for decades — it's painful but not always urgent enough to trigger immediate purchasing behavior.
The addressable market is real but niche. Total health IT is massive ($150B+), but clinical workflow research is a narrow slice — estimated $1-3B including what vendors spend on usability research, advisory boards, and ethnographic studies. Your realistic year-1 addressable market is probably 200-500 health IT vendors and digital health startups who would pay $10K-$100K/year, suggesting a serviceable market of $20-50M. That's enough for a strong venture-scale outcome but not a massive TAM. Growth tailwinds from AI companies needing training data could expand this significantly.
Mixed signals. KLAS proves vendors will pay $50K-$200K/year for clinical insight data — but KLAS has decades of brand trust. Custom UX research projects routinely cost $50K-$150K, proving budget exists. However: (1) many vendors believe their own customer advisory boards are 'good enough,' (2) procurement cycles in health IT are notoriously slow (6-12 months), (3) startups and small vendors — your most enthusiastic early adopters — have limited budgets. You'll need to prove ROI concretely (e.g., 'vendors who used our data had 40% fewer post-launch usability complaints'). The per-report pricing model for smaller buyers is smart for early traction.
The platform itself (submission portal, video/screenshot upload, tagging, search, subscription management) is straightforward — a solo dev could build the MVP in 4-8 weeks. The hard parts are NOT technical: (1) HIPAA compliance for video/screenshot de-identification is non-trivial and needs legal review, not just engineering, (2) building the contributor network requires ops work, not code, (3) quality control of submissions (ensuring they're genuinely useful, properly anonymized) requires human review processes. Deducting points because the true MVP complexity is operational and regulatory, not just software.
This is the strongest dimension. After thorough analysis, NO existing player productizes raw, in-situ workflow observation data from frontline clinical staff at scale. KLAS does surveys. Definitive does firmographics. Sermo does physician opinions. Academic studies are slow and unscalable. Custom consulting is expensive and siloed. EHR usage analytics (click tracking) exist but are internal to health systems, not sold to vendors. The specific intersection of 'crowdsourced + observational + frontline staff + productized for vendors' is genuinely unoccupied. This is rare — most startup ideas have closer competitors.
Strong subscription fit. Workflows change with every EHR update, regulatory change, and staffing shift — vendors need continuous, fresh data, not a one-time report. The KLAS model proves health IT vendors will maintain annual subscriptions for ongoing clinical insight. You can layer: (1) base subscription for library access, (2) premium for custom research requests, (3) alerts when new data matches their product area. The data depreciates over time (workflows from 2 years ago are less valuable), which actually reinforces recurring purchasing. Contributor payment also creates a flywheel — more contributors = more data = more vendor subscribers = more contributor payments.
- +Genuinely unoccupied niche — no one productizes raw frontline workflow observation data at scale
- +Strong market tailwinds: clinician burnout crisis, ONC usability mandates, and AI companies needing real-world training data all create growing demand
- +Proven willingness to pay in adjacent categories (KLAS at $200K/year, custom UX research at $100K+) validates budget exists
- +Two-sided network effects: more contributors attract more vendors, more vendor revenue funds more contributor payments
- +Data moat deepens over time — a library of 10,000 real workflow recordings segmented by EHR, department, and hospital size is extremely hard to replicate
- !HIPAA and de-identification are existential risks — a single PHI leak in a workflow video could kill the company. Legal/compliance costs will be significant before revenue.
- !Cold start problem on BOTH sides: need enough quality submissions to attract vendors, need vendor revenue to pay contributors. Chicken-and-egg is severe.
- !Health IT procurement cycles are 6-12 months — time to first enterprise deal will test founder patience and runway
- !Contributor quality control is hard to scale — poorly anonymized, low-value, or fabricated submissions could poison the dataset
- !Hospitals may push back on staff documenting workflows — even anonymized, this could be seen as exposing institutional problems or creating liability
Gold-standard health IT vendor ratings platform. Surveys healthcare professionals about IT product satisfaction, publishes 'Best in KLAS' rankings and detailed vendor performance reports used by both buyers and vendors.
Physician social network
Commercial intelligence platform providing hospital firmographics, physician databases, claims analytics, and technology install-base data. Helps vendors identify sales targets and size markets.
Healthcare strategy and UX research firms that conduct custom ethnographic studies, usability testing, and clinical workflow analysis for health IT vendors on a project basis.
Figure 1 is 'Instagram for medical professionals'
Start with ONE high-pain specialty (emergency department or ICU nursing workflows) and ONE EHR (Epic, since it dominates 38%+ market share). Recruit 15-20 ED/ICU nurses to submit annotated screen recordings and shift diaries over 4 weeks. Package the first 50 submissions into a polished 'ED Workflow Reality Report' — structured, searchable, with key findings highlighted. Use this as a sales asset to close 3-5 pilot vendor subscribers at $500-$2K/month. The MVP is the REPORT plus a basic submission portal, not a full platform. Prove the value prop with a curated dataset before building the marketplace.
Phase 1 (Months 1-3): Sell curated workflow reports as one-off purchases ($2K-$5K each) to validate demand. Phase 2 (Months 4-8): Launch tiered subscriptions — Starter ($500/mo, limited access), Pro ($2K/mo, full library + filters), Enterprise ($5K+/mo, custom research requests + API access). Phase 3 (Year 2+): Add premium services — vendor-specific custom studies ($20K-$50K), workflow benchmarking dashboards, AI training dataset licensing to ambient AI companies (potentially the largest revenue stream long-term).
8-14 weeks to first dollar via one-off report sales to early-adopter digital health startups (shorter procurement cycles than enterprise). 4-6 months to first recurring subscription revenue. 9-12 months to first enterprise deal ($50K+/year). The critical path is contributor recruitment and content quality, not software development.
- “huge gap between how a workflow looks in a demo and how it actually runs under pressure”
- “knowing where workflows actually break down — not the idealized version in the sales demo, but how nurses actually document at 3am when short-staffed”
- “That knowledge is rare on the vendor side”