Investing in a healthcare company requires a multifaceted approach to understand the underlying drivers – positive and negative trends, future changes and implications, dynamics of different sub-sectors and more. With current technologies and advancements, we at Unitus Ventures believe four sectors will play a disruptive role in making healthcare more accurate, remotely available and affordable – artificial intelligence, analytics, devices and home health.

We are currently running our annual StartHealth 4 competition to find, nurture and invest in innovative startups in the aforementioned areas,  and have put together a list of key questions, we as healthcare investors, would like to definitely know from entrepreneurs –

If you are working on an AI/machine learning/neural networks solution –

1. Does your AI algorithm involve any IP?
2. How do you source annotated data in the near term and at scale?
3. Who owns the data?
4. How often would you need to tune your algorithm and what are the costs/effort each time?
5. If your solution addresses inefficiencies in workflow (hospitals, diagnostics chains), quantify the extent of efficiency improvement, reduction in costs, ease of integration?

If you are working on a device –

1. Do you have any patents granted or FDA/CE approvals obtained?
2. What is the nearest existing alternative?  How is your device superior (not necessarily the tenth glucometer or the 15^th ECG device) ?
3. Who is your customer (B2C, B2B)?
4. What is your distribution model?
5. Can you share details of clinical studies conducted, showing how your device compares with the standard of healthcare device currently in the market?

If you are providing a home health service –

1. How is your service different from the many there already are?
2. Home health is a purely hyperlocal service. How do you ensure you are able to balance supply and demand at scale?
3. While there is significant evidence of demand, how is your model better at addressing availability of “quality supply” at scale?
4. How can you ensure consistency in healthcare delivery across your customers?
5. Is the business completely offline (people-based) or are there any material elements of technology that will help scale non-linearly?

Applications for our StartHealth 4 competition are open until June 6th, 2017. Know more details here.