by Elliott Engers

Earlier this year, Infinity Health took part in the first-ever UK AWS Healthcare Accelerator. The four-week programme - delivered in collaboration with PUBLIC - promised to match up industry leaders with companies they consider as ”thebrightest minds in emerging healthcare technology.” The accelerator provided technical, business and mentorship opportunities aiming to help us succeed faster.

A few weeks on from our final session, we are putting into practice many of the recommendations and learnings we took from the accelerator, and I wanted to reflect on the ones we at Infinity Health found the most valuable.

Working on vs working in the business

Although it was a significant time commitment for the team (up to 20 hours per week for five weeks, including “week 0”), one of the key benefits of the AWS Healthcare Accelerator was its intense nature. The jam-packed schedule took our senior leadership team out of the office, away from emails, to-do lists and meetings.

This felt overwhelming at times, but it forced us to make space to step back from day-to-day delivery and instead focus on strategic priorities and see more clearly how to move forward. As any small startup team knows, time to think is essential, but can be tough to carve out in practice.

Commercial focus

The AWS Healthcare Accelerartor was much more commercial in focus than any other accelerator we’ve previously taken part in. The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator, which we were on in 2017, and the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA),which we are a current Fellow of, do want participants to scale, but AWS really helped us to think beyond the NHS, and beyond the UK.

For one thing, the sessions helped us to understand the differing payment models of different countries. When we do scale internationally, we also now have a clearer picture of what we need to do to align our messaging about the value Infinity brings with the needs of different systems and purchasing mechanisms.

Sales strategy

One thing I found particularly interesting was from one of the mentors at AWS, Shabs Lorgat, who suggested that salespresentations be switched away from leading with the problem we are solving, towards leading with a case study. This would start presentations with a tangible example of the value we provide and then go on to explain why it is important and how we have achieved it. This is something we plan to try over the coming weeks.

Investment pitching

Infinity Health is about to start raising funds to support the next chapter of growth for the business, so the sessions on investment were particularly timely and relevant. Not only were sessions connecting us with investors helpful, but the insights some of them gave were at times unexpected.

For example one suggestion was that a data room could be a living resource within a business, rather than something that is compiled for investors at a point in time. The business could then reflect on core metrics like financials, shareholders, team, customers and other performance metrics at any point in time.

Networking

The healthtech startup world might feel busy to some, but in the UK at least, it is relatively close knit and supportive. Meeting other companies in person for the first time in over two years was excellent, and I felt inspired by so many on the programme, especially Thymia, and fellow DigitalHealth.London alumnus, Birdie.

Having others to bounce off and share ideas with was invaluable, and reminded us that together, healthtech companies can achieve more than the sum of our parts.

We are hoping to build even closer relationships, and perhaps even collaborations, with some of our fellow participants in future.

Using AWS allows us to punch above our weight

Being part of the AWS Healthcare Accelerator gave us the opportunity to be subject to external due diligence on the Infinity platform and its architecture. It was valuable to be guided by experienced solutions architects at AWS and encouraging to hear that Infinity is well-architected and positioned to scale.

Infinity is quite complex: we have an app, a web platform, integration APIs, orchestrated infrastructure as code. It’s robust, secure, resilient, scalable - all characteristics that are vital for healthcare - so it is a testament to our Head of Engineering and the team to have such positive feedback from AWS itself.