ride the innovator's slipstream

Healthcare’s digital dawn is here — and it’s not slowing down. The pace is blistering, the rules are shifting, and the future is arriving faster than most leaders can plan for. In this new reality, business as usual won’t cut it. Welcome to business unusual — where opportunity and risk arrive together, and hesitation can cost more than action.

Success now demands purpose, urgency, and a daily dose of boldness to seize the opportunities in front of us before they pass us by. The therapeutic window for digital transformation in healthcare is wide open — but to pause is to fall behind.

That’s why I’ve framed four essential strategies for this moment:

·       Ride the Innovator’s Slipstream — position yourself to learn fast, adapt faster, and leapfrog when the moment is right.

·       Join the Democratization Movement — lean in on the fact that innovation is no longer the domain of a few, but the shared work of patients, clinicians, and partners.

·       Embrace Contrarian Wisdom — challenge your own assumptions, break free from conventional thinking, and unlock possibilities hiding in plain sight.

·       Win Hearts, Widen Ripples — because no amount of strategy matters unless your people are inspired to move with you.

In this article, we’ll begin with the first strategy: Ride the Innovator’s Slipstream.

We’ll break it into three decisive actions:

·       Learn — realize what’s already possible and anticipate what’s next.

·       Load — assemble the capabilities, resources, and partners that will give you an edge.

·       Leverage — apply your capabilities and networks to create value faster than the competition.

Together, they form a blueprint for building the right skillsets in this period where momentum matters more than mastery — and hesitation costs more than risk.

Ride the Innovator’s Slipstream
In professional cycling, the rider just behind the leader gains a critical edge by staying in the “slipstream” — a low-resistance pocket created by the leader’s momentum. It saves energy, sharpens positioning, and sets you up for a perfectly timed leap forward.

For healthcare innovators, this doesn’t mean building every new platform or algorithm yourself — it means staying close enough to the front to learn fast, adapt quickly, and add new capabilities the moment opportunity opens. The smartest riders aren’t guessing where the leader will go — they’re reading every shift in the wind and road.

1.   Learn – Be in the Game, Not Just in the Lead

During the height of COVID-19, Teladoc surged to the front of telemedicine — nearly doubling its U.S. market share to ~19% and growing revenues from $553M in 2019 to almost $2B in 2021. But the race didn’t end there. EHR vendors embedded virtual care into their platforms. Amwell deepened health system partnerships. Provider systems scaled their own solutions. Zoom pivoted to HIPAA-compliant healthcare. Doximity entered with a physician-first approach.

They all learned from Teladoc’s lead — spotting gaps, adapting strategies, and built capabilities to compete. The takeaway? In the slipstream, you don’t have to start in front to finish there. You have to stay in the race, learn in real time, and be ready to surge when the curve bends.

The key is to be in the game, because today’s leader might not be tomorrow’s. For healthcare leaders and innovators, this is the essence of slipstream learning: absorbing lessons at someone else’s front edge, then applying them in ways uniquely suited to your lane.

2.   Load — Build Your Edge Before You Need It

Once you’ve learned where the leader is going, you need the muscle to break out at the right moment. That means loading your organization with the capabilities, resources, and partnerships that give you leverage when it’s time to move.

Consider how rapidly AI is disrupting radiological imaging. Yet leaders like GE Healthcare and Siemens Healthineers continue to hold strong positions — not by standing still, but by deliberately loading their organizations with what they’ll need to win. Since 2023, GE Healthcare has executed a series of strategic moves: acquiring Caption Health, MIM Software, and Intelligent Ultrasound to bolster AI capabilities, and forming a partnership with Blackford to expand its AI platform ecosystem. Siemens has similarly doubled down — integrating AI into MRI, CT, and ultrasound workflows, while investing heavily in training and customer enablement.

Beyond healthcare, think of how Netflix invested in streaming infrastructure years before most households had the broadband speeds to handle HD video. When the shift from DVDs to streaming became inevitable, they were already loaded and ready.

The takeaway for innovators? You can’t wait until the opportunity is obvious. The “load” phase is about stacking the talent, tech, and trust you’ll need — so that when the leader falters or the market turns, you can accelerate instantly.

3.       Leverage — Make Your Capabilities Work Overtime

In cycling, slipping in behind the leader saves energy — but the real win comes when you swing out of the draft and surge past. That moment is leverage: taking everything you’ve built, timed perfectly, and using it to change your position in the race. In healthcare innovation, it’s the difference between being well-prepared and actually turning preparation into market impact.

Kodak is the cautionary tale. In 1975, engineer Steve Sasson built the world’s first digital camera prototype. A groundbreaking invention… that never left the bench. Fear of disrupting their own film business kept Kodak from leveraging what they already had. By the time they acted, Sony, Canon, and Nikon had surged ahead — and the rest is bankruptcy history. The moral? If you don’t swing out of the slipstream and use your capabilities, the race will move on without you.

Now look at Amazon. They didn’t invent healthcare, but they didn’t need to. They leveraged core strengths honed in retail and tech — world-class logistics, supply chain mastery, customer obsession, and AWS cloud infrastructure — to accelerate into the sector. From acquiring PillPack to launching Amazon Pharmacy to buying One Medical, Amazon took capabilities built for one race and applied them in another, gaining instant momentum.

For healthcare innovators, that’s the essence of leverage: don’t just build capacity — find every way to apply it, multiply it, and make it work overtime. In the slipstream, the win doesn’t go to the rider with the biggest engine — it goes to the one who knows exactly when and how to unleash it.

More to come…
This look at Riding the Innovator’s Slipstream — learning, loading, and leveraging — is just the start. Each of the four strategies in the Dose of Innovation framework will get its own deep dive, breaking into three clear, actionable moves so healthcare leaders and innovators can shift from insight to measurable impact.

Next up, we’ll explore how to Join the Democratization Movement — reimagining, reinventing, and revitalizing your innovation approach in a world where technology no longer limits possibility, but our mindset might. After that, we’ll tackle Embrace Contrarian Wisdom and Win Hearts, Widen Ripples, each with tools to help you lead with sharper focus, deeper courage, and faster execution.

The therapeutic window of opportunity is wide open — but it won’t stay that way. In an era where hesitation costs more than risk, the leaders who move with purpose, urgency, and a daily dose of boldness will define healthcare’s next chapter. This is business unusual — and the race is already on.