NEMIC Expert Advisor: Karen Miller Gillis on Building Health Technologies for Adoption + How Great Innovations Take Root
Karen E. Miller Gillis - NEMIC Expert Advisor, Startup Venture Development
Founder & CEO, Vivvidae
Regulatory clearance is a milestone worth celebrating — the culmination of years of persistence, creativity, and belief. It’s that rare “champagne moment” where science and perseverance meet. It’s also the point where a new kind of work begins, translating a great idea into something that truly takes root in the complex, beautiful reality of clinical practice. Success happens when we can get a new product or therapy used consistently, meaningfully, and at scale by designing for adoption as intentionally as we design for approval.
From Approval to Impact
When a technology is truly adopted, it becomes part of how care is delivered. It fits into routines, workflows, and conversations. It’s trusted by clinicians, easy for staff to use, and clearly valuable to the system. That kind of integration doesn’t happen by accident; it’s the result of deliberate choices made early in development.
Understanding Your Customer
Every innovation enters an ecosystem and that ecosystem has needs that go well beyond performance specifications. A hospital or clinic isn’t just a site; it’s a living, interdependent system of people, processes, and technologies. Understanding how your technology integrates into those systems is key. Does it require new training? Extra staff time? Workflow adjustments? How does it interact with existing software or data infrastructure? The most successful innovators engage early and listen deeply to clinical site partners. They learn what adoption really looks like on the ground, and they build around those insights.
“Commercialization shouldn’t be a final step. It should be part of how teams think from day one.”
Designing for Fit
A great technology doesn’t just work; it fits. It fits the clinician’s routine, the IT team’s capacity, and the patient’s experience. Fit is the difference between something that’s admired from a distance and something that’s used every day. Adding the commercial perspective early results in a product that makes sense in real life.
Proving Commercial Readiness
Before scaling, teams should invest in structured learning opportunities such as pilots, early partnerships, or controlled limited deployments. These programs generate something more valuable than clinical data alone, they create commercial evidence. Commercial evidence tells the story of how a product performs in the field. It reveals how users interact with it, what training is needed, and where adoption friction arises. Each iteration sharpens both the product and the strategy, creating clarity around what it takes to succeed in real environments. This approach turns early experiences into momentum and gives investors and partners tangible proof that the product is ready to scale.
Building Commercial DNA Early
Commercialization shouldn’t be a final step. It should be part of how teams think from day one. When pricing, reimbursement, business model design, and user experience evolve alongside technology development, everything moves faster and more cohesively. Teams that embed this mindset early develop ‘commercial DNA’, the ability to make decisions with the end user, payer, and provider ecosystem in mind. It’s a way of working that always keeps front of mind the value that future sales representatives will need to convey to all key stakeholders to ensure adoption.
From Early Wins to a Market Blueprint
Early adoption is not about being everywhere, it’s about going deep somewhere. Demonstrating strong engagement and measurable value within a few early sites provides the foundation for broader success. When a technology achieves real traction including consistent use, enthusiastic champions, visible outcomes and economic benefit, those experiences become a playbook. The insights drawn from those first partnerships define how to position, train, and support adoption at the next ten sites, and then the next hundred. Depth creates the blueprint for scale.
The Future Is Bright
At Vivvidae, we believe the future belongs to teams that see commercialization as a creative act that blends empathy, strategy, and evidence. Designing for adoption doesn’t slow innovation; it sustains it. When innovators build with the realities of clinical care in mind, technologies don’t just get approved they get used. And that’s when the real impact begins. The future of health innovation is not just about what we invent. It’s about what we integrate…. and the future is bright.
Karen Miller Gillis- Founder & CEO, Vivvidae™
