The Person Who Decides Your Deal - And Why You've Probably Never Met Them.

Let's talk about a person who is rarely in the room.

Every significant private market HealthTech commercial conversation has a  cast; the occupational health lead who championed the product, the HR director who sponsored the evaluation, the procurement officer who manages the process. These are the people founders build relationships with.

And then there is the analyst, the underwriter, or the governance reviewer - two layers below the named decision-maker, working from a risk framework you've never seen.

What the Risk Assessor is Testing For

Of the private market risk assessments I have observed across corporate employer, insurer, and private provider procurement contexts, there are 3 key questions:

Question 1: What is the worst-case scenario if this goes wrong, and does this submission demonstrate that the vendor has thought about it? In employer health: what happens to employee data if there is a breach? In insurance: what happens to claims if the product underperforms its evidence claims? In private provision: what are the liability implications? Assessors need to see that the vendor understands the risk environment they are operating in.

Question 2: What does this require of us? The most common reason a private market submission stalls at the risk assessment stage is that it does not clearly answer the implementation burden question. How many FTEs are required? What existing infrastructure does it integrate with? What is the implementation timeline and who owns each phase? Leaving this for 'later discussion' is a risk flag.

Question 3: Has anyone like us bought this before, and what happened? A reference customer at commercial terms - same sector, similar organisation size, is the single most powerful risk mitigation available.

Three Moves That Change the Assessment

Move 1: Name the risk category using the buyer's language. For employer buyers, risk categories are: data liability, implementation resource, employee engagement, and claims or absenteeism outcomes. For insurer buyers: actuarial risk, regulatory compliance, clinical evidence quality, and operational integration. Lead your submission with a risk mitigation summary structured around the buyer's specific categories.

Move 2: Build a two-page implementation architecture into every submission. Who does what, in what sequence, using what resources from the buyer's side. Include a go-live timeline. Include an escalation path. Making the risk assessor's implementation analysis trivial is one of the most consistently undervalued commercial moves in HealthTech.

Move 3: Position your reference customer as risk transfer. 'Organisation X,  similar sector, similar size, implemented in twelve weeks, outcome data at six months available on request.' This doesn't eliminate risk. It transfers the burden of proof from your submission to an existing customer's experience.

Your Homework

Before your next submission, read it as a risk assessor who has never met you and has forty-five minutes to decide whether this represents acceptable risk for their organisation. Does it answer the three questions above? Where are the gaps, and what document needs to be added or restructured?

The founders who do this exercise tell me the same thing - they were building submissions for the champion rather than for the risk assessor. These are different documents, for different readers, with different concerns.

The HealthTech Scale Playbook covers buyer architecture in full - download link below.

In the next edition, I'll be sharing mid-year synthesis of where prevention capital is actually moving in private markets, and where the conversation is still noise.

With purpose,

Sara
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