As a healthcare entrepreneur, you have a lot on your plate. Between finding investors and working on your project, your hands are already full, which is why it is essential to utilize the available tools. We have years of experience detecting and monitoring the progress of existing and developing products in the health ecosystem and we’ve learnt tricks for how to do it accurately and efficiently and how best to use this information to help you on your journey.
Why is keeping an eye on your competition so important?
By following the progress of your competitors, you can gain essential knowledge about their resources and your place in the field. Knowing which competitors are behind you allows you to stay in front of them. You can keep track of their progress to ensure that your project reaches important milestones before theirs.
Knowledge of the competitors ahead of you gives you vital information about the options available. Their commercial pathway may be one you can follow yourself, and their methods for overcoming regulatory hurdles could clear a way for you to overcome those barriers.
Additionally, when looking at the competition you may realize that they are not competition after all. Collaboration may be the best option for you both. Healthcare projects contain multifaceted problems and you could work together to tackle different aspects of the solution. A team of diverse abilities and solutions is more likely to succeed.
What makes it so hard to keep track of innovations in healthcare versus other industries?
Health care specialists tend to look in a specific area for their competition. They likely know a lot about their particular problem and their particular approach and are unlikely to see a lateral solution as competition. For example, one entrepreneur was developing a vaccine for a heart disease using a specific technology. However, he was not aware of all the work being done to treat the cause of the problem that could render his application irrelevant. The intricacies of the human body and the complexities of its pathologies means drugs compete with implants, treatment pathways compete with apps and so on.
With so much progress being covered globally it’s easy to miss mentions of the things you need to keep an eye on. Unknown projects are right now targeting the same problem as you are. Without knowledge of their progress, you could be sideswiped by their innovation.
How does Health Horizon help track competition?
Health Horizon is a global data network that can track any technology or project in the world. We pull this together for you as a curated channel containing interactive profiles and timelines for the activities of each of your competitors and notifies you when they make progress you need to know about. A channel is curated by an expert so you can give direct feedback on what is relevant to you and why so the channel will get smarter over time to keep you on top of what is your unique competitive ecosystem.
How will it only take me 5 minutes per week?
Your channel will send you a regular digest summarizing the milestones that your competitors have made. This means you can simply scan this email to understand immediately what your competitors are doing right now without having to read entire articles. For milestones that need your critical attention you can read the primary articles and start your investigation from there.
Feedback is provided via simple buttons meaning tiny bits of feedback each taking 30 seconds will build up over the months to produce a highly accurate and relevant feed of updates.
How does Health Horizon differ from other tools?
Other market research tools tend to only track businesses and companies, missing out on the critical activities of the underlying product and the market signals these provide. Health Horizon follows the innovation itself in real time and links them to the company or companies involved. This is especially useful when products trade hands, which can be common during their development.
Additionally, other platforms do not personalize their information. Users are given a large, static dataset that they need to sift through to find their competition. Not only is this more work, but as mentioned above, entrepreneurs may miss possible competitors — this defeats the purpose of making your life easier.
On top of that, our platform structures the data to allow you to understand what each update means in context. For example, if we know a competitor received a certain grant, we will begin monitoring that grant to detect their activities. By doing this, we can start to track the resources and capabilities available to you including sources of training and funding that you could benefit from.
Health Horizon sorts and provides the most crucial details about the competition’s progress in real-time, and if you need to track particular activities more than others, we adapt our data to help. All users have to do is give feedback on the information’s relevance to train the system and it will continue to deliver up-to-date information.
How does Health Horizon work?
Health Horizon tracks public sources and integrates them with a growing global network of non-public sources. Our systems pick relevant data, and a human curator confirms them to train the algorithm. By using a combination of machine learning and human assistance, Health Horizon utilizes the best of both worlds. Computers monitor the large data sets and filter out what is unnecessary. Humans understand the user’s needs and ensure that the right information gets to them. The goal is for it as much as possible to feel like you have a dedicated market research person feeding you the most meaningful and essential information about your competition for 1/500th of the price of what it could cost to hire someone to do that.
What data does Health Horizon track?
To cover the important aspects of projects’ progress we have four main tracking systems for sources covering different stages of translation: publications, trials, news, official websites, and social media. These sources provide coverage of any technology or project from breakthrough, through development to its release and spread within a market.
We pick up when innovations receive funding, collaborate or partner with others, utilize facilities or capabilities, get media coverage, publish supporting evidence, progress in trials and more.
If you want to track a new type of milestone, let us know and we could start tracking it. You’ll be surprised at what’s possible. For example our capability to track the utilization of facilities was a request from Therapeutic Innovation Australia. They wanted to be notified when any innovation utilized a facility they funded. We developed a way of doing this and now we’re merging our knowledge with theirs to provide an even more complete picture. You can explore all the innovations tracked this way on TIA’s project page.
What are the main benefits an entrepreneur in the healthcare industry gets from having curated data of his competitors?
While we have covered why it is vital to keep track of the competition, collecting that data in an efficient manner can be difficult. Doing it yourself is overwhelming and time-consuming.
A channel of curated data cuts out the fluff and unnecessary details to deliver you with the most important information. It will push the milestones that matter the most to the forefront and filter out irrelevant information and your feedback makes this more accurate over time. The subscription nature of the channel means that in the future if you pivot or if your target market changes the channel pivots with you to deliver exactly what you need to know on your new journey.
Key Takeaways
Using Health Horizon’s curated platform, you will be up-to-date on the progress and developments you need to know about in your unique competitive landscape. Take a look right now by going to Health Horizon’s website and creating a sample channel for your project. It will populate competitors for you to track from our publicly curated dataset. For a free deep dive into your competition, request a demo and we’ll include our non-public data to give you the confidence that comes with being on top of your competition.