The 3 Healthcare Buyer Questions
Why the Person Who Signs Your Contract isn’t the Person Who Has to Use it
I spent 18 months coordinating my late husband’s care across 10 doctors. Not one platform I touched during that time (the portal, scheduling app or discharge paperwork), ever told me why I’d need to log back in after that first appointment.
- No one assumed I’d still be there in month four, cross-referencing lab results across three systems that didn’t talk to each other.
- No one walked me through what came next.
The tool showed up already finished, built for someone who wasn’t me and sold to someone who wasn’t me either.
I wasn’t in the room when that software got designed. I wasn’t in the room when it got purchased. That’s the room your healthtech company keeps missing.
The Wrong Person, Right Product Problem
Here’s the pattern behind almost every stalled deal and every churn spike I’ve dug into: the vendor builds for the product team, markets to procurement, and loses adoption. Not because the product fails. Because education never reaches the person who has to use the thing every day.
Three different people touch your platform before it succeeds or dies quietly inside someone’s EHR. They rarely overlap, and they almost never hear from you in the same language.
- The buyer decides whether your product gets funded.
- The user decides whether your product gets opened.
- The quitter decides whether your product gets abandoned three months after go-live.
Your sales content, your demo, your case study deck all get built for the first person on that list. The other two find out about your product secondhand, if they find out at all.
Question 1: Who Actually Decides
The buyer is procurement, an IT steering committee, a CMO signing off on a six-figure line item. They evaluate in a language your user never hears: integration burden, security review, board-level ROI, budget cycle timing.
Treating “the buyer” as one persona is where a lot of vendor content goes wrong. athenahealth’s 2026 Physician Sentiment Survey (fielded by the Harris Poll on athenahealth’s behalf, October 2025, 1,045 physicians) found 65% of physicians at enterprise organizations report comfort with AI, compared to 43% at small practices. That’s a 22-point swing in comfort level for the exact same product, which means your enterprise buyer and your five-physician-practice buyer are running two different evaluations of what you’re selling.
The independent practice buyer is evaluating you against a harder backdrop than most vendors account for. The same survey found 89% of physicians say staying independent has gotten harder, including 88% of those in practices of five or fewer. That buyer isn’t asking “will this innovate my workflow.” They’re asking “will this be one more thing that breaks.”
Your enterprise buyer and your five-physician-practice buyer are not the same person wearing a different badge. They’re running different math, and a pitch deck built for one alienates the other.
Question 2: Who Actually Uses
The user is the clinician, the caregiver, the frontline staffer who opens your app at seven in the morning with a patient already in the room. This is the person your buyer conversation never mentions by name.
The same 2026 survey reports 62% of physicians say their EHR has gotten more efficient, and 42% say AI is already reducing administrative burden. Those are real gains. But efficiency on a slide deck and efficiency felt by the person doing the clicking are two different claims, and the second one only holds if someone trained that person on why the tool exists, not just how to click through it.
I watched this happen with paper discharge instructions no one explained. It happens the same way with software: a nurse gets handed a new interface with no context, decides in the first 5 minutes whether it saves her time or costs her more of it, and that decision gets made long before your onboarding email sequence finishes sending.
Undertrained adoption doesn’t fail loudly. It goes quiet, the way expensive software always does when the people meant to run it never got a reason to.
Question 3: Who Actually Quits
The quitter is whoever hits the point where the distance between what the buyer promised and what the user needed becomes unworkable. Sometimes that’s the clinician. More often, in caregiving specifically, it’s the family member who was never in the design conversation at all.
Most patient engagement tools are built around a single named user: the patient. The portal login, the app onboarding, the “welcome” email; all of it assumes one person is managing one account. It rarely assumes a caregiver is the one actually logging in, translating lab results, and deciding what the patient needs to know today versus what can wait.
That’s the part of “wrong language” that isn’t about reading level. It’s about who the product assumed would be in the room, and what that person needed to know that no one told them. When the caregiver isn’t accounted for anywhere in onboarding, she doesn’t file a support ticket. She just stops logging in, and your churn report records that as a patient engagement problem instead of what it actually was: a design decision no one made on purpose.
The backdrop makes this worse. Physician optimism about the U.S. healthcare system overall sits flat at 30% in the same 2026 survey, the third straight year in that range. Your buyer and your user already expect the system to disappoint them. A tool that reinforces the split between who decided and who needed something different just confirms what they walked in believing.
The Question Worth Asking Before Your Next Demo
None of this means rebuilding your product. It means asking, honestly, who was actually in the room when this tool got designed, and who’s going to be in the room when someone has to use it at 7 a.m. with a patient in front of them or a parent on the phone.
Those are rarely the same person. Your content, your demo, and your onboarding sequence were probably built for only one of them.
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