Co-Founds Katherine Kuzmeskas and Lucas Hendren

When I first met Kat in 2014, she was crafting market analyses and strategic plans for Yale-New Haven Health system and taking the first steps towards founding her own startup. Even though I just met her, I knew the venture would be something exciting.

She has always been one of the most creative, thoughtful, and provocative health system strategic planner clients I’d worked with, and her new company, SimplyVital Health (SVH), embodies all of those attributes.

Like SVH’s focus on blockchain technology to improve care coordination, my work had also positioned me at the intersection of innovation and healthcare’s shift towards Value-Based Care. With a shared passion for improving healthcare, early on I asked Kat “What projects do you wish you could tackle, but can’t seem to find time in the day to get to?”

From there, we formed an easy partnership, in which I’d take on “mini-engagements” to help SVH keep moving forward. These are some of the exciting engagements we’ve done together:

Building a client prospect pipeline from scratch: Building a meaningful prospect pipeline is critical to any business looking to quickly acquire customers. Combining lessons learned from Advisory Board’s healthcare prospect-building engine, interviews with other startups focused on enterprise sales, and some comprehensive business literature reading, I sent Kat a “prospecting playbook” designed to help her team quickly build a list of potential clients and warm leads.

Surveying the Market and Competitive Intelligence: As SVH’s ConnectingCare platform took shape, Kat had already surveyed many clear competitors, but a couple of specific organizations that seemed most similar to SVH’s offering were proving more elusive to understand. Deploying tactics I’d learned from my firm’s market intelligence departments, I worked backwards from competitor client testimonials to learn key details about competitor offerings, helping SVH establish a more unique and strategic position in the market.

Staying on the cutting edge of healthcare policy: The Advisory Board is a healthcare industry-leading research organization as well, as up-to-date on US healthcare policy implications as any organization in the country. Borrowing approaches from our best-in-class researchers, I dived deep into the Department of Health and Human Services’ committee meetings minutes to obtain and interpret the very latest policy dynamics and best practices from healthcare providers reacting to policy around the country. To supplement this, I’ve been layering on commentary on how day-by-day policy changes have strategic implications for SVH’s technology product customers to create more meaningful dialogue with customers.

Building a consulting/technology support hybrid business model: Across two consulting firms and dozens of client engagements, I’ve observed firsthand what works (and what doesn’t) to best deploy expertise and technology against a client problem. Understanding SVH’s capabilities and the specific problems their clients face, we’ve crafted an array of support models for SVH to plug-and-play depending on their client engagement.

Going to market — crafting meaningful client proposals: If I’ve learned anything in consulting, it’s the importance of expressing complex concepts in simple, compelling ways. SVH’s Director of Growth and Operations and I iterated on early proposals several times to nail down a crisp, clear framework for how SVH’s expertise and ConnectingCare platform would address the tailored needs of healthcare provider clients.

Going to market — strategic pricing of SVH expertise and ConnectingCare platform: another key element of the proposals was price. Dusting off pricing strategy lessons from business school, weaving in some principles from behavioral economics, such as multiple, equal, simultaneous offers (MESOs), and drawing on experience negotiating technology contracts with healthcare providers, SVH’s Director of Growth and Operations and I crafted strategic pricing that has since advanced multiple proposals.

Jesse Scharff has served as a strategic advisor to SimplyVital Health, Inc., since early 2017, offering expertise and outside perspective based on nearly ten years consulting at Deloitte, The Advisory Board Company, work with over 100 hospitals and health systems, and an MBA from Georgetown University.