How to sell to doctors, break into healthcare

Selling to doctors is nothing like selling to tech teams. It follows different rules, different incentives, and a completely different psychology. Amit Goldman has lived on both sides of the equation. She started in public health, moved into medical sales, stepped into telemedicine during the chaotic early years of COVID, helped build an EHR startup, joined a diagnostics venture fund in Silicon Valley and somehow still finds time to mentor founders who want to break into healthcare.

Her story is a reminder that healthcare isn’t slow—it’s precise. It moves differently because mistakes cost lives, careers and reputations. If you want to build or sell into this world, you don’t kick doors open. You learn how to enter them.

The unconventional way into healthcare innovation

Amit didn’t plan to go into tech. She grew up surrounded by clinicians, studied public health, and began her career inside one of the largest private clinic networks. Her early choice was simple: follow the “serious” clinical path everyone expected or walk into sales and marketing, which nobody in her medical family considered a noble route.

She chose sales.

That decision ended up rewriting her entire career. It taught her how clinics operate from the inside, how doctors think, how patient flow works, and how buying decisions are made. Later she joined a medical startup building telemedicine tools long before telemedicine became mainstream. Timing was early, but that early timing gave her a front-row seat to one of the biggest healthcare shifts of the decade.

Today, she works with DigitalDx Ventures, helping diagnose and fund breakthrough diagnostic innovations while supporting a fast-growing health startup on the ground.

Where the real medical innovation is happening

For Amit, the exciting frontier isn’t just hospital software or admin automation. It’s personalization at scale.

A dermatologist taking photos of your moles today and comparing them to your moles next year. Blood tests that can detect cancer biomarkers long before symptoms. Wearables that track hormones, glucose, heart rhythms. Tools like Flo Health that help women read their own biology in real time. Recovery platforms that analyze sleep cycles instead of guessing. AI models reading medical data with the accuracy of a clinician.

This shift is huge for one reason: doctors get twelve minutes per patient. No human can process personalized biological data that fast. But machines can.

Healthcare is quietly moving from “treat the average patient” to “treat the individual body.” And the startups that lean into this movement—without trying to replace doctors—are finding real traction.

Why selling to doctors is nothing like selling to SaaS buyers

The biggest mistake tech founders make is assuming doctors buy like marketers or sales leaders. They don’t. Not even close.

Doctors care about accuracy, liability, peer trust and science. They do not care about your flashy landing page, your influencer campaign or your hype video.

If anything, Amit found the opposite. In a viral LinkedIn poll, almost 80 percent of people said they trust a doctor without social media presence more than one with huge online visibility.

In medicine, credibility is earned through track record, publications, peers and outcomes—not branding.

So when founders pitch physicians the usual startup way, everything falls apart.

Doctors don’t want clever copy. They want sensitivity and specificity numbers. They want to understand risk. They want to know if you will be there when the software breaks at 6 a.m. before surgery. They want proof that patient data won’t leak and ruin their career. They want to know how this integrates into their workflow and whether administration will even approve it.

Selling to them starts with understanding their world. If you can’t speak their language, they tune out long before you finish your sentence.

The Clubhouse era that changed Amit’s life

During COVID, Amit and a small team created the biggest medical community on Clubhouse—12,000 clinicians, founders, researchers, and health operators from around the world gathering in live audio rooms to talk medicine.

Think of it like a digital medical conference happening every night.

Presidents of medical associations, Harvard professors, telemedicine pioneers, diagnostics innovators—they all came. People who normally cost six figures to get in a room with were suddenly one click away.

Those conversations opened doors. Some of Amit’s current startup connections and even a major investor relationship came directly from those Clubhouse nights. She jokes that a random woman once recognized her on the street in Berlin as “Amit from the medical rooms.” That’s how tight the community became.

It was a reminder of something every founder forgets

Healthcare gets built inside trusted circles. You need to be in them.

How founders should think about entering healthcare

Amit is blunt about this one: if you have no medical background and no clinical partner, expect years of pain.

Healthcare punishes ignorance. Regulations are strict. Reimbursement pathways are complex. Hospitals have layers of decision makers. Doctors don’t buy everything—administrators do. Clinical trials take time. FDA timelines ruin burn rates. Hiring expensive U.S. reps too early can sink the company before the product even gets tested.

That’s why she encourages founders to bring on advisors, co-founders or mentors who understand the terrain. Not academics who review from afar—operators who know the process, the politics and the pitfalls.

And she urges founders to test demand early. Don’t build for three years and only then discover that clinics don’t even want your solution. Run outbound. Test your ICP. Book ten calls. See if anyone even cares.

Healthcare rewards those who respect the system—but it also rewards those who don’t wait three years to learn a simple truth.

A field worth entering

Europe is aging. Healthcare demand is exploding. Preventative care is becoming a necessity, not a luxury. Longevity is becoming an industry. AI is unlocking diagnostic capabilities once limited to top specialists.

It’s one of the hardest markets in the world, but the opportunity is enormous for those who understand it deeply.

Amit’s career proves something important

Healthcare is slow until it’s not. But it only moves fast for the people who take the time to learn how it moves.