Lessons from Manav Sevak: scaling go-to-market strategy in healthcare
Manav Sevak, CEO and Co-founder of Memora Health, the next generation operating system for care delivery.
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Welcome back to Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and dive into building a digital health business from 0 to 1.
This week, we get to know Manav Sevak, the CEO and Co-Founder of Memora Health, the intelligent platform that simplifies how patients and clinicians navigate complex care journeys.
Memora Health has developed the most comprehensive end-to-end platform for analyzing and structuring fragmented health care journeys. Memora uses artificial intelligence to digitize and automate patient communication workflows, ultimately helping organizations dramatically improve patient outcomes and operational efficiency.
In May 2021, Memora raised a $10.5M venture round led by a16z, with participation from AlleyCorp, Martin Ventures and angels such as Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner, Co-Founders of Flatiron, and Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures.
Memora’s founding story:
Manav started his career in medicine as a computational biologist, but Memora started out of first and secondhand patient communication challenges Manav and his cofounders had seen in clinical settings.
Manav and his co-founders, Kunaal Naik and Nisarg Patel, knew each other quite well before Memora, one being a childhood friend and another from college who he lived with for a while. One of their close friends who they were living with was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and Manav shares that they saw firsthand how difficult it is for people to navigate the healthcare system, especially with a highly complex condition.
Memora initially piloted their product in a research setting with the intention of publishing data on improving health outcomes, implementing a text message reminder product with two different health systems. After seeing valuable data on how the platform was helping and having the care teams express interest in paying to continue using the platform, the team decided to incorporate Memora and continue working on it.
Memora Health’s product offering:
Manav shares that Memora’s product evolved quite a bit in terms of both scope and focus. Broadly, what Memora does now is help health systems digitize and automate complex care workflows.
From symptom management guidelines to general medication adherence data, Memora takes data on tasks that care teams manually have to complete for patients and digitizes them into:
A cohesive, step-by-step messaging journey that guides patients through all the different parts of their care
Automation of what simple tasks need to be completed in the EMR based on the patient-reported data
Every care team wishes that they could spend a significant amount of time with patients outside the walls of the hospital, practicing at the top of their licenses, if they had the time and resources to empower them. At its core, Memora wants to make it significantly easier for care teams to manage and support their patients outside the walls of the hospital.
Memora Health’s go-to-market strategy: building a meaningful customer base
Find your wedge and then iteratively expand the scope.
While Memora now supports comprehensive care journeys for many different types of complex populations from oncology to cardiology to maternal care, it started in a much smaller scope. Manav shares that Memora approached medication adherence first, which is a particularly complex problem set. There is no one-size-fits-all solution in healthcare— this problem helped them realize how complex it is not necessarily just to change patient behavior, but how complex healthcare journeys as a whole look. Manav prioritizes making Memora a configurable and modular platform.
Starting with a focus on medication adherence also gave Memora insight into how if you can really move the needle on a clinical part of the patient's journey, it has a tremendous impact on both the outcome that patient has and the clarity that both that patient and care team have in the journey.
Memora launched pilots with a heavy focus on clinical research and a focus on outcomes
What a pilot meant to Manav was having a clinical team adopt the platform, even if that was through the form of grant funding, and that took their team around 3-4 months. Early on, the focus on academic medical centers and research helped them understand the scale and complexity of the need and drove them to incorporate and work on Memora full time.
Health systems have expressed and urgent need for two things: Tools that empower physicians and systems that can maintain and support a certain amount of volume and bring patients through the door. If your product does that, you’ll have an easier time getting your foot in the door.
There’s many different value props in healthcare—driving more revenue, helping to improve outcomes, helping to reduce operational spend, and more, but Manav believes it comes down to who you're selling to inside of the health system. Naturally, some are more important than others, based on the circumstances and the status quo.
Manav shares that in the last 12 months, a need they’ve consistently seen from health systems is tools that empower their physicians much more effectively, which is partly reactionary due to the pandemic. Because there's such a significant amount of additional data that physicians are starting to see and starting to have to parse through, these systems need to maintain and consistently support a certain amount of volume and bring patients through the door.
Every single health system looks a little bit different. Manav says that academic health systems look very different from community health systems which look very, very different from individual health systems in rural areas. Focus on discovery and who you're talking to within that health system.
Speak to the right person within the customer that your value proposition applies to and most importantly, listen.
Manav’s #1 piece of advice for selling into health systems: listen. Understand the reality of people on the other side of the table getting emails about hundreds of different tools while having different priorities to deal with. No matter how big of an objective your particular product helps solve, there's 20 other objectives that you don't see behind the scenes that that health system and that leader may still have to deal with. Listening and asking a lot of questions is probably the most important part of the process.
Be very critical and upfront around how your value prop matches what that particular individual is saying and looking for. Manav shares that a mistake many companies make early on, which Memora did too, is adapt their value prop too much to the extent that it's not what the product actually helps accomplish, just in order to get a sale done or appeal to one particular stakeholder. The reality is that inside of that organization, there's probably other stakeholders your particular value prop will appeal to a lot more—it’s about finding them, listening, and asking them the right questions.
Stay true to where care is being delivered.
Memora has now worked with over 50 organizations from life science companies to health plans to large health systems, and Manav shares that their thesis has been to stay very true to where care is really being delivered.
Memora’s product serves highly complex populations, from cancer patients to patients just coming out of surgery. These patients typically undergo their most intensive episodes within hospitals and large healthcare systems, which is why Memora has continued to focus on large healthcare systems as their primary target.
By continuing to stay focused on helping patients and providers collaborate on episodes of care, regardless of additional revenue opportunities, Manav believes opportunities in lots of different areas will be unlocked downstream.
Setting your company up for success
Trust and aligned motivation among a founding team is more important than expertise.
Manav believes that what makes their team successful is each person having different domains they’ve spent time researching and understanding, and the team having trust in that person to make decisions in those domains. Whether it's the right decision or not, there’s a trust that the person will find the right course of action and there isn’t an overlap in decision making.
While different types of competencies are important, realistically, the founding team is probably not the best at any particular element and will eventually hire people who are better. To Manav, synergy, trust, and motivation is critical.
Build an inclusive and diverse company culture.
Manav champions Memora’s mission-driven culture. Every Monday at the all-hands meeting, the team hears a patient story on how the platform has impacted them or different challenges they have navigating the healthcare ecosystem. Manav believes this helps the team rally around their North Star, staying focused on building their product the right way and moving as fast as they can to solve these problems.
Manav also indexes on Memora being highly collaborative. He shares that many people who have joined Memora, even from other healthcare technology companies, have been pleasantly surprised at how cross-functionally teams work together on value delivery for clients, product roadmap, making investments, and more.
On top of this, nearly 50% of Memora’s VPs are female.Setting the foundation for a diverse team makes it significantly more feasible to build a diverse culture in the long-term.
The healthcare industry today has an increased focus on digital health and the improved consumer experience.
It’s hard for digital health products to attribute certain outcomes to their interventions, especially in environments where hundreds of different tools are being used in parallel. While it’s product-specific on how easy it is to pilot, Manav believes the appetite for digital health has increased.
Due to the pandemic and evolving healthcare tech, health systems now spend more time evaluating tools that have started to appear in the ecosystem. Manav also believes that healthcare system leaders have become much more sophisticated buyers in understanding how certain interventions will actually move the needle. In Manav’s opinion, piloting now is both easier and harder—there's more infrastructure in place and focus on innovative technologies, but there's a ton of tools in the ecosystem. Being consistent with what value you’re providing is harder.
Trends to watch out for:
Healthcare, as opposed to being viewed as discrete episodes, is a much more continuous or longitudinal journey.
Manav has found that complex patients often go through a continuous timeline of events whereas the healthcare system treats them episodically right now . And we think about this very much as healthcare being a very longitudinal journey for a patient, of which 99% of focus and money and resourcing has been invested in the 1%, where a healthcare episode actually takes place right now, rather than the remaining 99%. Opportunity to innovate and deploy meaningful tools in the remaining 99% of time that patients are outside the walls of the clinic is still very open.
Second is the overall transition to value based care, and transitioning from volume to value.
Manav has seen tons of tools start to appear to help patients access care much more effectively, as well as make sure they’re being benchmarked and tracked much more effectively. This comes in the form of hospital at home programs, value-based tracking companies, care management teams, a greater focus on quality improvement and standardization, and more full stack models that are bringing the ancillary resources needed to manage patients outside the hospital into healthcare systems.
Interested in learning more about Memora? Learn more here and follow on Twitter, Linkedin.
Thank you to my amazing team, Joanna Shan and Rafael Ostria.