DTx: It Isn’t One Category

One article in my series about Digital Therapeutics after interviews with CEOs in the new category.

A number of DTx execs talk about the category in a homogeneous way.

Your customers view products that come in front of them as potential solutions for unmet clinical needs. There’s been a broad usage of the term digital therapeutics but that doesn’t convey anything important to the customers.  This creates confusion with customers and is not describing the solution you are bringing. Digital therapeutics are a number of different things. Describing yourself to payers, providers, or patients as a digital therapeutic doesn’t mean anything to them.  Your customers aren’t sitting around thinking about the digital therapeutic category. They think about the root problem your product is trying to solve.  Positioning your product outside the norm of how the healthcare community thinks of products will result in a huge uphill battle as you try to get adoption. You have to position products inside traditional categories that the healthcare space thinks of every day. Those categories would include therapeutics, diagnostics, case management, or health and wellness.

If you aren’t identifying the right traditional category and aligning to how the healthcare community thinks and talks then you are speaking to your customer in a different language than they are used to. You must meet your customers on their terms using the frame of reference that they understand. If you do, you will be helping them with challenges they have not been able to solve for themselves.

Having difficulty understanding how to tell your story in alignment with how your customer thinks? I’ve been doing this for over 15 years and of helped more than 21 different brands grow massively.