Positioning health tech products for buyers, not users
In most technology markets the user and the buyer are close together, sometimes the same person. In healthcare they are almost never the same. A clinician uses the product. An operational or digital lead sponsors it. A finance director funds it. An information governance team can stop it. A commissioner decides whether it becomes standard practice. Each of those people cares about something different, and a proposition written for one of them will fail with the rest.
This is the most common positioning error we see in health technology, and it is expensive because it is invisible. The product is good. The demos go well. Nothing closes.
Three questions that change the proposition
Who has the problem, and who owns the cost of it? A product that saves clinician time is valuable to clinicians and neutral to a finance director unless the time converts into activity, capacity or avoided agency spend. Positioning has to express the benefit in the currency of the budget it is asking for.
What is the comparator? Health buyers do not evaluate you against other start-ups. They evaluate you against the current pathway, including doing nothing. NICE’s evidence standards framework is explicit that the comparator should reflect the care option in the current NHS pathway (NICE). If your material compares you to competitors rather than to today’s practice, it is answering a question nobody asked.
Whose plan does this belong to? Technologies attach to organisational priorities. In England, the 10 Year Health Plan sets out shifts from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention and from analogue to digital, and promises value-based procurement methods, an NHS Healthstore for approved apps and an innovator passport to reduce duplicate assessment (Hill Dickinson, 2025). A proposition mapped onto a stated priority travels through an organisation. One that requires the buyer to invent the rationale does not.
What good positioning contains in this market
- A named buyer. Not a segment. A role, with a budget and a target they are measured against.
- A problem stated in their language. Waiting lists, length of stay, did-not-attend rates, staff vacancy cover, readmissions, unwarranted variation, referral quality.
- A quantified claim you can defend. With the evidence behind it, and honesty about its strength. Over-claiming is the fastest way to lose a clinical audience permanently.
- A comparator. Current practice, described accurately.
- A believable implementation story. Who does what, for how long, alongside the day job.
- A price that matches how they buy. Per site, per patient, per pathway, annual licence, outcome-linked. The model matters as much as the number.
Evidence is part of positioning, not separate from it
Health buyers rarely take claims on trust, and the evidence they expect is proportionate to what you claim. NICE launched the early value assessment route in 2022 to evaluate promising technologies for unmet need more quickly while evidence is generated (Health Technology Assessment commentary, 2025). The practical implication for positioning is straightforward: decide the claim first, then generate exactly the evidence that claim requires. Companies that generate evidence first and derive a claim from whatever the data supports usually end up with a weak claim in a crowded category.
Positioning also decides what you do not build
A clear position tells the product team what to ignore. Health technology companies are unusually vulnerable to specification drift, because every prospective customer asks for something bespoke and every request sounds like the path to a deal. Without an explicit position, the roadmap becomes an archive of other people’s requirements, and the product becomes harder to sell to anyone in particular.
Symptoms of weak positioning
- Pilots that go well and never convert to paid contracts.
- Long sales cycles where new stakeholders keep appearing.
- Pricing conversations that start from the customer’s budget rather than your value.
- Marketing that describes features and technology rather than outcomes and comparators.
- A pipeline of one-off deployments that cannot be repeated elsewhere.
Each of these is usually read as a sales problem. Most of the time it is a positioning problem arriving late.
How FastForward can help
We help health technology and software medical device companies position products for the people who make and fund decisions.
- Buyer and payer mapping. Who buys, who blocks, who benefits, which budget pays, and what each of them must be able to say internally.
- Value proposition development. Claims expressed in the buyer’s measures, with the evidence and comparator to support them.
- Pricing and commercial models. Structures that fit healthcare budgets and procurement cycles.
- Message testing. Propositions tested with real buyers before you commit a sales team and a marketing budget to them.
To discuss your positioning, email hello@fwdtech.co.uk.
References
1. NICE, Evidence standards framework for digital health technologies — https://www.nice.org.uk/corporate/ecd7/resources/evidence-standards-framework-for-digital-health-technologies-pdf-1124017457605
2. Hill Dickinson (2025), The 10 Year Plan: a focus on healthtech and innovation — https://www.hilldickinson.com/insights/articles/10-year-plan-focus-healthtech-and-innovation
3. Health Technology Assessment commentary (2025), NICE’s early value assessment — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12555772/
4. NHS Confederation (2025), Ten Year Health Plan: what you need to know — https://www.nhsconfed.org/publications/ten-year-health-plan-what-you-need-know