Every industry, including sickcare in the United States, is struggling with how to digitally transform themselves. In the case of sickcare, the transformation is a large part of the the big fix changing sick care to healthcare. Here is why non-sickcare entrepreneurs fail in sickcare.

Here are the stops along the digital health new product roadmap.

Google and Mayo Clinic announced a 10-year collaboration to put Mayo’s patient data in the cloud, expand AI capabilities, and build a Google office in Rochester. We've seen a slew of such partnerships as big tech vies for healthcare’s cloud business nationwide. Meanwhile, Apple launched three new studies with leading medical researchers to explore whether its Watch is a meaningful tool for monitoring women’s health, hearing, and mobility.

As noted in a recent article, technology has become central to how every business competes. Futuristic advancements like artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing are no longer pie-in-the-sky propositions, but mission critical initiatives that leaders are racing to implement within their organizations.

Unfortunately, most of these initiatives fail. In fact, McKinsey found that fewer than a third of organizational transformations succeed. That’s incredibly sobering. Imagine any other initiative with that type of expected return not only getting consistently funded, but enthusiastically viewed as a smart bet on the future.

Sickcare pracitioners and entrepreneurs should take the lessons learned to heart:

1. Focus on People First, Technology Second

Sickcare digital transformation will require changing patient and doctor behavior. Education + experience + engagement enables behavior change and quality improvement that translates into financial impact. However, it does not guarantee it. If only it that were so. Patients and doctors are much too messy, emotional and complicated and they don't make it easy. Some are getting the Blue Button Blues.

2. Establish Clear Clinical and Business Outcomes 

Innovation is about outcomes and impact, not inputs. But organizational innovation and digital transformation only happens when intrapreneurs i.e. employees with an entrepreneurial mindset trying to act like entrepreneurs, are able to work in and engage with a culture of innovation with the goal or creating stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation. There needs to be structure, process, culture, engagement and leaderpreneurs driving favorable outcomes. Here are some examples from NASA, Gore and DARPA

3. Identify A Keystone Change

Instead of going for moonshots, try something less ambitious.By now you have probably heard about the various aims of sick care innovation and entrepreneurship. We started with the triple aim. Improving the U.S. health care system requires simultaneous pursuit of three aims: improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita costs of health care.

However, as more and more doctors got fryed, or just cooked but not done, improving the doctor experience, not just the patient experience, was added, making it the quadruple aim, since happy doctors make happier and healthier patients

Now, a fifth aim, improving sick care business processes, like revenue cycle management, billing and collecting, coding and many more, make up the quintuple aim. Finsicktechnopreneurs are taking a bite at the apple.

A patient-centered approach to revenue cycle technology is more than a smart strategy; it will soon be the only viable option for providers.

The days when insurance companies shouldered 90 percent of claim reimbursement have passed. Today, two-thirds of Americans are afraid they will receive a surprise medical bill, according to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

The digital transformation of sick care is intended, in part, to move it to healthcare instead, focusing much more on disease prevention, wellness, making smart purchasing decisions, eliminating waste and unnecessary care and preventing sick patients from getting prematurely sicker. The goal, at least in the US, is to die young as late as possible without going bankrupt.

4. Treat Transformation As A Journey, Not A Destination

Digital health entrepreneurs, like their comrades in arms, are pioneers, not navigators. Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under conditions of uncertainty with the goal or creating stakeholder/user defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model.

But, uncertainty is not the only part of our VUCA world.

The digitization of sickcare will take generations to achieve. Those taking the journey should be guided by a moral compass that reconciles the ethics of medicine with the ethics of business, and puts caring at its core and honors the foundations of the fiduciary relationship between doctor and patient, be it sickcare or, eventually, healthcare.

Arlen Meyers, MD,MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@ArlenMD and Co-editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship.