Are You Measuring Inputs or Impact?

Sick care products and services, whether they are created by a for profit or non-profit, ultimately should be measured by the impact they have on patients or beneficiaries. Have you achieved your mission?

Unfortunately, the vast majority of non-profits and their funders ,and, many digital health entrepreneurs don't see it that way.

Most non profit groups track their performance by metrics such as dollars raised, membership growth, number of visitors, people served, and overhead costs. These metrics are certainly important, but they don’t measure the real success of an organization in achieving its mission. They are inputs and, for the most part, vanity numbers.

Here is a different way.

In other words, measure inputs, outputs and impact.

In the scientific publishing world, the impact factor (IF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times it's articles are cited.

Social impact funders agree that measuring an investment’s social effect is important, that measurement can help organizations make better decisions and communicate their value, and that financial returns should be balanced with social returns. But most of these points of agreement remain theoretical: Few resources discuss the specific practices and methodologies that investors actually use to measure social impact. 

In some instances, measuring the direct contribution to a specific impact is hard, if not impossible to exactly measure. For example, the mission of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs is to help members get their ideas to patients. However, as a "dating service" connecting members of the open biomedical and clinical innovation ecosystems through an international chapter network, we make dates, not babies. It is up to members to create products and services that have patient impact. Like the old adage about advertising, half works, we just don't know which half.

Sick care entrepreneurs should be listening. Too often, particularly in digital health entrepreneurship, the goal is to produce a product that does not require FDA clearance, scale it as quickly as possible using viral emarketing techniques and then exit with the help of supportive investors. What is missing is the impact factor.

Impact can be described as the multiple of user defined value created by the outputs. Are you creating an app to reduce unwanted pregnancies or help women get pregnant? Your impact should be the results of true positives and true negatives, not how many customers "engage " on your platform.

Without measuring your impact, what you are doing is merely mission theater instead of doing what is mission critical.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs