Judy Faulkner, founder and CEO of Epic, had a good blog post the other day titled More Complex Than Rocket Science where she talks about the complexity involved in healthcare IT. From the post:

"My favorite t-shirt says, “Healthcare IT is more complex than rocket science.” The three Epic employees who used to work in rocket science agree."

Healthcare IT is absolutely super complex. And that complexity creates a ton of challenges for founders trying to get their idea into market. But that complexity is also an advantage in that it creates a moat around a business where it's very difficult for a copycat to come along and recreate what the company is doing. For example, if you're doing automated care management for cystic fibrosis (CF), you need to wrap your head (and your product) around specific nutrition insights, medications, lung function testing, infection management, psychological support, financial aspects of CF care, and then roll that into a service with some technology wrapped around it. And that's just to build a useful product, never mind the challenges associated with taking it to market.

The upside of the pain in taking a healthcare product to market is that often the product/market fit you’ve found is its own moat.