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Stop Solving Problems Your Leadership Doesn't Care About
- Christian Steinert
- Jul 28
- 3 min read
How to tell a real pain from an annoyance, and why it decides whether you get a strategic seat
As I prepare for my August TIGER Talk at Innovate New Albany, I’m continuing to be reminded of something critical. Proximity to pain determines your strategic seat. At a healthcare organization, ask yourself: what problems are truly impacting growth? Revenue operations and billing are two distinctly different functional areas, both with incredible opportunity to leverage data as a vehicle for massive improvement. But the hard part isn’t finding problems in these areas, it’s knowing which ones are worth solving.
What Actually Counts as a Pain
One thing to clarify - what is a pain? I’ve had lots of confusion around this question the past 3 years. An annoying task felt by an executive like manual reporting in Excel appears to be a pain because they talk about it. In my experience, a task like this isn’t a true pain (even though I’ve mistaken it for one). Sure, saving an exec 75 hours per year by automating a report is great, but it isn’t a deep enough problem. It’s an annoyance more than anything. It takes time away from their strategic work, but at the end of the day it’s not derailing their growth.
A pain is something significantly impacting revenue, driving material cost at scale, or exposing the organization to regulatory risk. In healthcare that last one carries as much weight as the first two. Unmanaged HIPAA exposure is a pain before and after there’s a violation.
Where the Real Pains Live
A pain is either causing issues with an organization’s current processes and/or blocking a specific function from happening entirely. Take revenue operations for example - if you can’t accurately tie back the source of your customers, how will you confidently allocate lead gen/marketing dollars? Since subscription-based healthtech companies lean on Meta Ads often, if the website tagging and flow is broken, attribution and the origin of leads becomes impossible to track.
Furthermore, if you don’t have a structured process or tool in place to generate claims to payors, your denials may be increasing. There is obviously more to it on denial rates, but solving for pieces like this giant puzzle gives data expertise a seat at the strategic table. If a healthcare company is struggling to get paid, the pain felt because of that process gap impacts the entire company.
Use This as a Filter
As either a healthcare data team or data consultancy, don’t confuse annoyances with true pains. An executive complaining about a manual report or an IT leader wanting to migrate the data from on prem into the cloud appear as pain at first glance. Dig further. Always ask where a particular problem is directly impacting revenue, cost at scale, or regulatory exposure - that’s how you build solutions carrying deep impact and weight within an organization. Otherwise you’re just building data solutions that maybe one or two people care about, but makes you look like “data theater” to investors and leadership that are actually trying to build and sustain company growth.
Christian Steinert is the founder of Steinert Analytics, helping healthcare organizations turn data into actionable insights. Subscribe to Rooftop Insights for weekly perspectives on analytics and business intelligence in these industries.
Also - check out our free Healthcare Analytics Playbook eBook course here.
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