Curriculum
MATTER built a 10-track curriculum to address the needs of healthcare startups.
Our curriculum educates entrepreneurs through workshops that help them segment their target customers and craft compelling value propositions. Workshops include pragmatic advice on how to recruit founders and employees, raise money, identify and approach customers, shorten sales cycles, build pipelines, and scale up for success. The curriculum also provides leadership training and insights into new regulations and healthcare trends. Click here for a full list of workshops through the end of 2017.
Many startups start their path with a hot technology that doesn’t really solve a problem for their target customer. Another common challenge is that the entrepreneur might be targeting the wrong customer. In an industry where the recipient of care – the patient – often does not pay for care directly, it’s a common occurrence. By introducing tools like the business model canvas, we provide a framework to test hypotheses about potential customers and what value the business provides to the customer. This track includes workshops on how to identify healthcare problems and, once identified, how to pitch the story to an investor. For serial entrepreneurs who are looking for their next business idea, we also feature a number of workshops that showcase opportunities for innovation in healthcare.
Startups often fail to create value for key stakeholders. In the rapidly changing healthcare landscape, it can be particularly difficult to understand all the parties, and how evolving payment and delivery models will affect opportunities for innovation. These workshops address problems that matter to different stakeholders in healthcare.
Workshops emphasize the importance of customer validation by teaching the “lean launchpad” methodology of product and business model design. Medical device and software development veterans also discuss what it means to develop products in a regulated environment and under quality systems.
Ideas are cheap. Executing on those ideas and building products and business around them is what separates unicorns from flameouts, serial entrepreneurs from one-timers. These workshops focus on how to execute an idea – emphasizing building a team and creating and executing a business plan.
These workshops address the basics of entrepreneurial financial literacy. This track will prepare entrepreneurs for investment and explain cash burn rate and how to identify and reach inflection points of a business’ value. Entrepreneurs will complete this track with an understanding of when and how to raise capital, as well as how to come up with a financial development plan.
Selling to health systems is hard! It’s often difficult to find the right decision maker. Even when an entrepreneur has found the right individual, does he or she have the right story to get their attention? How can an entrepreneur score a pilot at a hospital? This track helps startups crack the code of hospitals and health systems.
Products and services need to be tested, especially in healthcare, where protecting patient safety should always be at the forefront of an entrepreneur’s mind. Workshops in this area will teach how to design a quality testing model to ensure proper function, including how to identify a medical care site in which to perform the study.
Drug, device, and often software development are subject to regulatory controls in healthcare. This track aims to familiarize entrepreneurs with the key time points along their commercialization path when they should be considering a consultation with the FDA. The workshops also provide case studies where entrepreneurs can learn about how to position their product and studies during these conversations.
While most first-time entrepreneurs consider the date they’ll need to get an indication for use approved by the FDA, few carefully think through their reimbursement and coding strategies or how they might set up a study to collect the necessary data. These workshops focus on coding basics and reimbursement, including emerging opportunities to secure reimbursement for new software solutions.
Starting a business creates many legal hurdles that can be exceptionally challenging and expensive. This series walks entrepreneurs through many complicated legal concepts related to healthcare and entrepreneurship, including financing, shareholder’s agreements, HIPAA compliance, patents, and licensing.