From Lego to Infusion Therapy: How Consumer Product Obsession Helped Uptiv Health See Healthcare’s Latent Needs

From Lego to Infusion Therapy: How Consumer Product Obsession Helped Uptiv Health See Healthcare’s Latent Needs

Lego thrives while kids live in digital worlds by obsessing over latent needs. Uptiv Health is transforming infusion therapy using the same consumer product playbook. Here’s what healthcare founders miss by never leaving healthcare.

Most healthcare founders come from medicine, insurance, or health tech. They understand the industry deeply but see problems through healthcare’s lens—clinical outcomes, reimbursement models, regulatory compliance. Torben Nielsen came from Lego. And that outside perspective became his unfair advantage.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Torben Nielsen, CEO and Co-Founder of Uptiv Health, traced his path from the Danish toy company to transforming the $30 billion infusion therapy market. The connection isn’t obvious until you understand what Lego actually teaches: how to find needs people don’t articulate and build experiences around those latent desires rather than stated problems.

The Lego Education

“I started my career at Lego because it’s a Danish company and I’m Danish and it really was an amazing company,” Torben recalled. “If I had my choice, I would go back and work for them any day.”

What made Lego special wasn’t the product itself. It was the methodology behind understanding customers. “It’s a very creative company to work for and they pay attention to consumer needs like nobody else,” Torben explained. “It’s incredible that they’re even around in today’s world. Right. Where most kids operate in a digital world. But Lego has never done better.”

This is the paradox that fascinates: physical plastic bricks shouldn’t compete with Minecraft, iPads, and TikTok. But Lego doesn’t just compete—it dominates. The secret isn’t better bricks. It’s better understanding of what kids actually need versus what parents think kids need or what kids say they want.

“They’re really good at paying attention to what kids want and find latent needs,” Torben noted. “And that education in consumerism and what good branding means is something that I’ve been able to take with me throughout my career, particularly in healthcare.”

What Healthcare Insiders Miss

Healthcare insiders see healthcare problems. They think about clinical efficacy, evidence-based protocols, payer negotiations, and regulatory requirements. These matter, but they’re not latent needs. They’re visible, articulated, industry-specific problems.

Latent needs are different. They’re the things people tolerate because they don’t realize alternatives exist. They’re the friction points that seem inevitable until someone from outside the industry asks a naive question: why does it work this way?

When Torben entered healthcare in 2006, recruited from Xerox to help Cambia Health Solutions create member-centric services, he brought that naive outsider perspective. The team decided to focus on provider directories, but with a twist—integrating price transparency so members could see out-of-pocket costs before choosing providers.

“Health care is probably the only industry, I think, where you don’t know what it’s going to cost you until 60 days after,” Torben observed. “It’s incredible that we as consumers don’t ask for that information upfront.”

Healthcare insiders accept this opacity as inevitable. Reimbursement is complex. Pricing varies by procedure, insurance, and negotiated rates. It’s not that they don’t see the problem—they just see it as unsolvable.

Torben saw it as unacceptable. Consumer product companies don’t get to hide pricing until after purchase. Lego doesn’t charge you based on some opaque negotiation between your “toy insurance” and the retailer. The price is on the box. Healthcare’s opacity wasn’t inevitable—it was a choice.

Finding Infusion’s Latent Need

After building and scaling HealthSparks, the price transparency company that hit number 196 on the Inc. 5000 list, Torben started looking at infusion therapy. Healthcare insiders saw a clinical service that worked. Patients get infused, therapies are delivered, outcomes are measured. What’s the problem?

The problem was nobody actually wants to be there.

“Nobody wants to go to a hospital, right?” Torben stated plainly. “It’s very hard to find parking. It’s hard to find the building where you’re going to get the infusion. Once you find the building, maybe it’s up on the third floor. Once you get to that third floor, then it tends to be an open room where chairs are just lined up in a row, where you almost take a number, you take a seat and then you get your infusion over the next couple of hours. There’s absolutely no privacy.”

Healthcare insiders see this and think: that’s just how hospitals work. Patients accept it because they need the therapy. What are you going to do—make hospitals feel like Starbucks?

Torben thought: yes, exactly. Why can’t infusion happen in a retail location next to Starbucks where you park right outside, walk into a private suite with your preferred beverages and entertainment, and actually feel like a person instead of a number?

The latent need wasn’t better clinical outcomes. The therapy itself works fine. The latent need was dignity, convenience, and being treated like a consumer instead of a patient ID.

The Consumer Product Playbook in Healthcare

Uptiv Health’s operational model comes directly from consumer product thinking. Every patient starts in the app—the same way you’d start any consumer experience digitally. They photograph their insurance card, set preferences for blankets, beverages, entertainment. They communicate with nurses via secure SMS before arriving.

“We also have our patients go through a small questionnaire where they can let us know how they want their infusion,” Torben explained. “So would they like one blanket with their infusion? Would they like an extra blanket? Are they bringing a friend? If so, what’s their name? Would they like coffee, tea, or soda with the infusion? Would they like snacks? Would they like Hulu or Netflix on the flat screen tv?”

This seems obvious from a consumer product lens. Of course you’d ask preferences and personalize the experience. But it’s radical in healthcare, where personalization usually means clinical care plans, not whether someone wants coffee or tea.

The most striking decision: no reception counter. “We feel there are enough barriers in healthcare, we don’t need to create yet another one between us and the patient,” Torben noted.

Reception counters are everywhere in healthcare. They’re assumed to be necessary. But from a consumer product perspective, they’re just barriers between the customer and the experience. Lego doesn’t make you check in at a counter before playing with blocks. Netflix doesn’t require reception desk approval before streaming. Why should healthcare?

The ROI of Consumer Thinking

The consumer product approach delivers results that healthcare insiders said weren’t possible. Patient NPS of 99 in an industry where 50 would be remarkable. Referring provider NPS of 87. Over 150 unique providers sending patients in 12 months. First center cash flow positive in just over a year.

These metrics happen because Uptiv solved the latent need—people don’t want healthcare experiences, they want consumer experiences that happen to include clinical care.

“You’ll be surprised that you know, how little effort it takes, you know, to add these additional elements to it and really just think about how do we create a much better experience,” Torben said. The operational model is actually leaner than traditional infusion centers because technology replaces expensive processes. No reception counter means no receptionist. Digital intake means no clipboards and paper shuffling.

The company delivers care for 40 to 70 percent less than hospital settings while achieving higher satisfaction. That’s only possible by rebuilding from consumer principles rather than optimizing healthcare processes.

What Founders in Other Industries Can Learn

The Lego-to-healthcare journey reveals a broader principle: sometimes the best way to transform an industry is to never really join it. Bring frameworks from adjacent industries and apply them to entrenched problems.

Healthcare insiders couldn’t see infusion’s real problem because they were too close. They saw clinical challenges, reimbursement complexity, capacity issues. All real problems. But not the latent need.

Torben saw it immediately because he wasn’t thinking like a healthcare person. He was thinking like someone from Lego trying to understand why kids play with certain toys. The question wasn’t “how do we deliver therapy more efficiently?” It was “what do these people actually want and why aren’t they getting it?”

The same principle applies everywhere. Fintech founders from banking miss opportunities that founders from e-commerce see clearly. Enterprise software founders from IT miss chances that founders from consumer products spot immediately. The industry expertise that seems like an advantage becomes blinders.

The Three-to-Five Year Proof

Looking ahead, Uptiv aims to reach 50 to 60 clinics proving that hybrid in-person and virtual care creates better outcomes at lower costs. “I would love to have optiv with, you know, 50 or 60 clinics across the nation and really prove out that hybrid model of in person care and virtual care creates better outcomes for the patient and will decrease costs in the system,” Torben shared.

If they succeed, it won’t be because they had better healthcare expertise. It will be because someone from Lego asked the naive question: why does anyone tolerate this experience?

That naive question, asked with genuine curiosity about latent needs, might be more valuable than a decade of healthcare industry experience. Not because industry expertise doesn’t matter—it does. But because sometimes you need someone who doesn’t know that certain problems are “just how things work” to see that they don’t have to work that way at all.

The lesson from Lego isn’t about toys. It’s about never accepting that obvious friction points are inevitable. Kids don’t need plastic bricks in a digital world. They need creative play that plastic bricks happen to enable better than screens. Patients don’t need hospital infusion centers. They need effective therapy that retail locations happen to deliver with more dignity and less cost.

Finding latent needs means looking past what industries tell themselves about why things work a certain way and asking what customers actually want. Sometimes that takes someone from Lego.