"Once founders understand health economics, everything clicks — the pitch, the clinical conversations, the product roadmap."
Health Economics for Founders
Most healthcare startups pitch the wrong story. Here's why — and how to fix it.
Health economics isn't a regulatory checkbox. It's the logic that makes your product make sense — to investors, to clinicians, and to the market you're entering.
The Gap most founders miss
You've built something that works. But does it make economic sense to the system it has to live in?
Healthcare products don't just need to work clinically — they need to survive the economic logic of the systems that adopt them. Payers, providers, and commissioners all make decisions through a health economics lens, whether they name it or not.Most early-stage founders discover this late — after a promising pilot, after a failed procurement, after an investor asks a question they can't answer. We help you get ahead of it.
Health economics is a day-zero activity
The value story
Your narrative
Value is not enough, you need to communicate it to all stakeholders. Your value story is about what your product does, and how it does it and why your product matters.
Development
Value is a feature
Your product's value is a feature, just like any other feature. Value needs to be incorporated into you rprodcut specification and reviewed in future design reviews.
Investors
State of mind
Investors join your venture in order to make money. Their language is focused on commercial success. If you want to gain their trust, you need to speak their language.
Payers
Is it worth it?
Changing your value proposition after the product has been developed and and clinically tested, is close to impossible. Your value proposition has to be baked in to your product.
The tools
Economic Strategy
Health technology assessment, pricing strategy, and reimbursement negotiations are disciplines
that most health tech founders encounter far too late — after pivotal trials are locked, product
features are fixed, and irreversible strategic decisions have already been made. By the time a
company's HEOR team builds the economic model, and its Market Access team walks into a payer
negotiation, the architecture of the value story has long since been determined by choices that
were made in the earliest stages of the venture. Health Economics is your economic strategy.
PICO
A strategic business decision
Defining your Population,
Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome early is the single highest-leverage move you can make.
QALY
Quality Adjusted Life Years
Your impact will be translated in to money. Since costs are in money, benefits will also be translated to money. Are you good enough?
ICER
Incremental Value
The Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) suggests that it is not enough to create value, you have to be better than the incumbent.
Economic Models
Economic Modelling
Early stage models are almost always wrong. But they force us to discuss the major assumptions, dependencies and sensitivities to make our company future proof.
Dan J. Gelvan
Dr. Dan J. Gelvan is a health economist and entrepreneur with over three decades of experience
at the intersection of academic economics, venture capital, and health technology innovation. He
holds a BA and MA in Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD in Economics
from Roskilde University (RUC) in Denmark.
His investment career spans senior leadership roles in both venture capital and digital health. As
Managing Director of Aurum Ventures MKI, a fund with assets under management exceeding $100 million, he oversaw investments across a portfolio of technology and life science companies.
He subsequently served as CEO of t-syte, a digital health investor and incubator, where he worked
directly with early-stage health tech ventures on strategy, commercial positioning, and economic
viability.
Across his career, Dr. Gelvan has been involved with more than 30 health technology start-ups —
as founder, CEO, board member, chairman, or strategic advisor. These companies have collectively raised more than $750 million and 6 have been exited. This breadth of hands-on
experience is what distinguishes his teaching: the frameworks he presents are not theoretical
constructs but tools he has used, stress-tested, and refined across decades of real ventures, real
investment decisions, and real market access challenges.
The Impact
Reimbursement and coverage
Getting the health-economics right from the beginning will improve your chances of future reimbursement and coverage.
FAQs
Read the thinking behind the practice.
Every week on Substack: frameworks, case studies, and honest analysis of the health economics questions early-stage founders are actually facing.
Feel free to reach out for a free value-tuning meeting
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