What’s Your ROI?

Recently I was on a call with a senior healthcare executive, sharing perspectives on industry trends. The conversation turned to my background, and he asked how I would characterize my value.

This was familiar territory, so I discussed my vision for transforming healthcare analytics. Product strategy. Improved patient lives. A seamless transition from what I offer in skills to what you get in outcomes.

I ended, as I often do in conversations, with "Does that make sense?"

"Yes," he replied. "Sounds impressive. But I have a follow-up - What's your ROI?"

I froze. Sure, I could talk about market dynamics and growth potential all day. But putting a dollar figure on transformation? That’s harder to quantify.

The thing about ROI in healthcare – we naturally talk about the desire to improve patient outcomes, advancing medical research, and making healthcare more equitable through various means. These are noble goals. Important goals. But at some point, someone will ask about the money.

I’ve been taught this lesson before – only in a different context...

During my graduate school days I would be taught complex biological pathways and chemical formulas in class - every protein, every interaction, every feedback loop. But come examination time, I was being asked how to develop a new drug? How to measure its efficacy? Which patients are likely to benefit most? That’s the difference between theory and application. Conceptuality and practicality.

It quickly became clear – understanding something, and executing on something, are very different skill sets.

The same is true for business transformation. It's easy to talk about moving from services to products. The hard part is quantifying exactly how that journey creates value. Not just in patient outcomes, but in terms of dollars and cents. Not just revenue, but actual profit. Not just growth, but sustainable margins.

Think about it this way: when someone says they want to transform their business, what they're really saying is "I want to take something we do for X and turn it into something different worth multiples of X." That's not just a technology challenge or a strategy challenge – that’s a basic math problem.

So let me tell you what I could have said to that executive. Instead of romanticizing about transformation and sounding like an expensive consultant, I could have simply done the math:

“I value turning analytics projects at 40% margins into 60% margins through productization. That’s because while each project is unique, built from scratch, there will always be common patterns across projects that I can spot to create resusable products. For a $10 million services business, that's an extra $2 million in profit - not counting the scalability benefits of having more customers and therefore a bigger impact on patient lives.”

That's language businesses understand.

But let me be clear - focusing on ROI doesn't mean abandoning healthcare's mission.

In fact, it's quite the opposite.

When you build something that generates strong returns, you're actually proving that you've created real value.

Think about it: margins only improve when customers are willing to pay more than it costs you to deliver. And in healthcare, customers only pay more when you're genuinely helping them solve important problems.

The real value of ROI isn't in showing that we can make money - it's in proving we can make our mission sustainable.

Profits aren't equal to patient care; they're what make patient care possible. Without strong margins, even the most innovative healthcare solutions remain just ideas.

And ideas, no matter how noble, can't help patients.