Andrés Lawson, Osana Salud | B2B Product Strategy and Go-to-Market to Transform Healthcare [Ep. 48]

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

For the vast majority of the population in Latin America, going to the doctor hurts as much as the ailment itself (endless lines to be seen, poor care, shortages of medicine, and so on). That is why, in response to these problems, several startups healthtech have emerged in recent years, such as Sofía and Yana, whose founders we interviewed in previous episodes. But a healthtech with a different approach has also emerged: Osana Salud.

Unlike startups that offer technology-enabled health services directly to the consumer, such as digital pharmacies, online health insurance, and telemedicine platforms, Osana Salud develops technology infrastructure to help healthcare companies (insurers, medical service providers, and pharmacies) offer a better service to their patients, based on data, automation, and user experience.

In short, Osana Salud lets healthcare organizations create innovative and scalable health solutions and services, with less technology development time. And, to date, it has raised more than 25 million dollars from venture capital funds such as General Catalyst, Quiet Capital, FJ Labs, and K50 Ventures.

In this episode, we spoke with its CEO and cofounder, Andrés Lawson. Andrés told us about the opportunities that exist to improve healthcare services in Latin America with technology. He also explained the logic behind Osana Salud’s strategy and how they have executed their Go to Market in a market that is so complex to penetrate.

What You Can Learn Today

Opportunities for technology solutions in the healthcare sector
Healthtech product strategy
The process of defining a go-to-market strategy

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Youtube Timestamps*

The Healthcare Industry in Latin America

[2:00] - How did Andrés get into the world of startups?
- An entrepreneur father in the construction sector
- Experience in consulting at Bain & Co. and building Dafiti with Rocket Internet
[3:22] - What is Osana Salud?
- Technology infrastructure for the healthcare industry
- Empowering providers, funders, and the pharmaceutical industry to deliver solutions that are more comfortable, more efficient, and with better outcomes
- Digitizing the patient experience (consultations, prescriptions, lab work, and monitoring of chronic patients)
- Clients with more than 7 million patients
- 200 thousand people served thanks to Osana Salud’s infrastructure
[5:45] - What problems did they identify in the healthcare system, and where did they see more opportunities to take advantage of technology?
- Greater access to quality healthcare services in Latin America
- Closed technology, neither interoperable nor standardized, that blocks the flow of information across the value chain
- Only 3% of the information generated in healthcare is used preventively
- Lack of interdisciplinary teams in the sector
- Technology as a way to increase inclusion
- The role of public vs private healthcare services
[8:41] - Why does Andrés believe there has been so little technology adoption in the healthcare sector?
- A universal medical record
- Different technology solutions across healthcare providers
- From closed monoliths to a more open ecosystem
- Slower changes because of sector regulation
- An industry with high sensitivity to risk
[12:51] - Does the sector have the right incentives to make its patients’ medical records public?
- The U.S. case and the situation in Latin America
- The importance of regulation and execution as a necessary complement
- The market trend of focusing on user experience
- A view of how fast the industry will change
[16:28] - How did Andrés learn the healthcare industry so fast?
- A conversation with Jorge, his partner of 15 years
- Challenges in Latin America: a great need in the healthcare sector and great potential impact from the solutions
- Ignorance, creativity, and constant learning
[20:06] - Recommendations for learning how the industry works
- Understanding who the people are that need the solution
- Going out to talk to end users and putting yourself in their shoes

Osana Salud’s Strategy

[24:07] - How did they go from being a B2C service to B2B infrastructure?
- Affordable health plans focused on primary care
- Poor technology in the network of healthcare service providers
- An organic process toward providing the technology and infrastructure to providers instead of solving the problem directly
- The need to involve users in the development of the technology
- WhatsApp First solutions
[30:25] - How did COVID and the telemedicine project of the Argentine government’s Programa de Atención Médica Integral (PAMI) catalyze Osana Salud’s growth?
- A technology solution and user experience built for patients over 70
- First client closed in Mexico
- Including more people in the healthcare system as a factor for a larger market
- Opportunities for technology solutions specific to the healthcare sector
- Technology for companies that have not been born yet
- Decentralization of hospitals
[35:45] - What possibilities exist to take advantage of the data they have access to?
- Phase 1 of Osana Salud and Value-based care as the goal
- Using the information to improve healthcare services

Osana Salud’s Go to Market

[38:22] - Osana Salud’s Go to Market strategy and sales process
- Development of the infrastructure
- Osana Certified Partners that sell and implement with the client
- Actions that do not scale
- Development of specific solutions for particular use cases
- “Productization” backward, from the particular case to the infrastructure
- Identifying and solving the partners’ challenges in implementation
[43:08] - How do they prioritize which type of client and use case to focus on more?
- Health insurers incentivize their providers to interconnect with the infrastructure
- Insurers’ interest in the patient experience and in their information
- Network Effect generated by Osana Salud
[45:22] - Perception of healthcare professionals’ willingness to adopt technology
- Characteristics of the technology they currently use
- Fast adoption of technology that actually helps them
- The case of a solution for monitoring patients with COVID
- Word of mouth for solutions that add value for them

Tweet Round

[48:09] -
- Recommended book: Utopía de un hombre que está cansado, by Jorge Luis Borges
- Changes in the Latin American startup ecosystem: creating a virtuous circle in which the more veteran founders support those who are just starting
- Founder to interview: Ady Beitler, of Nilus