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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Early Payer Relationships Drive Market Entry:
Uptiv secured insurance contracts 6-7 months before opening their first clinic. This strategic decision maximized their addressable market from day one, enabling them to accept all patients regardless of insurance provider. B2B founders should identify and establish critical partnerships well before launch to remove friction from early customer acquisition.
Prove Value Through Micro-Commitments:
Uptiv's sales strategy focuses on a simple ask to specialists: "Give us just one patient." This low-risk approach allows providers to validate Uptiv's service quality firsthand, leading to 150+ unique provider referrals within 12 months. B2B founders should design their initial customer engagement to minimize commitment while maximizing the opportunity to demonstrate value.
Technology-Enabled Cost Optimization:
Rather than adding cost through technology, Uptiv uses their app to eliminate traditional operational overhead. By shifting administrative tasks to patients pre-visit and centralizing phone operations, they maintain premium service while achieving faster break-even. B2B founders should leverage technology to simultaneously enhance user experience and improve unit economics.
Human-Centered Design as Differentiation:
Uptiv eliminated standard healthcare barriers like reception counters and clipboard paperwork, replacing them with personalized digital experiences. This approach delivers both operational efficiency and customer delight, driving their 99+ NPS. B2B founders should identify industry conventions that create friction and design solutions that benefit both users and business operations.
Hybrid Service Model Evolution:
Uptiv's vision combines physical locations with virtual care capabilities, creating a scalable model attractive to both venture capital and private equity. Their wraparound services for chronic care management expand their value proposition beyond core infusion services. B2B founders should design their service model to capture expansion opportunities while maintaining focus on their core offering.
Conversation
Highlights
The Six-Month Bet That Transformed Uptiv Health’s Go-to-Market
Most healthcare startups wait until they have traction before tackling insurance contracts. Torben Nielsen did the opposite, and it changed everything.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Torben Nielsen, CEO and Co-Founder of Uptiv Health, shared the counterintuitive GTM decision that set his retail infusion company up for explosive growth: spending six to seven months securing contracts with every payer before opening a single clinic.
“We decided very early on that it was important for us to get on contract with all the payers so we could see patients regardless of what insurance company they had,” Torben explained. “Actually, you know, six to seven months before us even opening up our first clinic, we started working with payers to get on contract.”
The payoff? When Uptiv opened their doors in Detroit, they could treat any patient from day one. No insurance barriers. No coverage questions. Just a clear path from specialist referral to patient treatment. Within 12 months, over 150 unique providers were referring patients. Their first center became cash flow positive. And they achieved a 99 NPS score among patients.
The Problem Most Healthcare Founders Miss
Healthcare has a structural chicken-and-egg problem that kills momentum. Specialists won’t refer patients without payer contracts. Payers want volume before contracting. Patients won’t come without insurance coverage. Most founders try to brute-force their way through this by launching first and proving demand, then using that proof to negotiate contracts.
Torben saw this trap from his previous company. At HealthSparks, his price transparency software that he spun out from Cambia Health Solutions in 2012, he learned how payer relationships actually work. The company scaled from 11 people to over 100, landing at number 196 on the Inc. 5000 list as the second fastest growing digital healthcare company in 2016.
That experience taught him something crucial: in healthcare, removing barriers before launch feels like delay but actually creates acceleration.
Why Infusion Needed Disrupting
Uptiv Health is transforming how people receive infusion therapy for conditions like MS, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s and colitis, and severe asthma. The traditional model? Hospital-based infusion centers where patients navigate parking nightmares, hunt for the right building and floor, then sit in open rooms with chairs lined up in rows.
“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.”
The environment is sterile, cold, noisy. When nurses ask for medical history, twenty other patients hear everything. And it’s the most expensive place to receive infusion therapy.
Uptiv’s model moves infusion into retail locations next to Starbucks in strip malls where patients park right outside, walk into private suites with flat screen TVs and recliners, and receive personalized care for 40 to 70 percent less than hospital settings.
But none of that matters if insurance won’t cover it.
The Sales Playbook That Only Works With Contracts
With all payer contracts secured upfront, Uptiv could execute a remarkably simple sales strategy. They hired a salesperson to knock on specialist doors in Detroit before the first clinic even opened. The entire pitch: “Give us just one patient and we will show that we can deliver on that promise.”
This pitch only works because of the payer contracts. A specialist won’t risk sending a patient somewhere that might not be covered by insurance. The administrative headache alone prevents referrals. But with every payer contracted, specialists face zero barriers to trying Uptiv.
The company also removes all the other friction that makes infusion painful for medical practices. “We will do the prior auth, we will collect all patient information, medical information that’s needed for this infusion to take place,” Torben explained.
Specialists doing in-office infusion deal with constant headaches around payer contracts, wholesaler contracts for drugs, and prior authorizations. It’s operational overhead that distracts from medicine. Uptiv absorbs all of that while getting patients in chair faster.
The referring provider NPS score sits at 87. That’s not satisfaction, that’s advocacy. And it compounds through word-of-mouth as specialists talk to each other about the model.
The Technology Layer Nobody Expected
What makes Uptiv truly different isn’t just location or contracts. It’s how they’ve rebuilt the entire patient journey using technology that actually reduces costs.
Every patient starts in the Uptiv app, where they set up their profile, photograph their insurance card, and communicate with the care team via secure SMS before arriving. They can even video consult with nurses to prepare for their infusion.
Before each visit, patients fill out a questionnaire about their preferences. One blanket or two? Bringing a friend? What’s their name? Coffee, tea, or soda? Snacks? Hulu or Netflix? The private suite is equipped with these personalized preferences before they walk in.
The most radical 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. Nurses greet patients at the front door, already knowing who they are from the scheduled appointment and often their photo in the app, then escort them directly to their personalized suite.
All the famous healthcare clipboards, consent forms, and insurance card copies happen through the app before arrival. “All the consent forms they usually fill out, our patients do via the app from home prior to them coming in,” Torben explained. “And they will never see those consent forms again until the year after.”
This isn’t just better experience design. It’s a leaner operational model. By eliminating the reception counter, they eliminated the receptionist position. By centralizing operations with one phone number to a call center, no phones ring in the centers disrupting patient experience.
“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. “It’s actually a very lean experience that we have.”
The Unit Economics That Make Private Equity Pay Attention
The first center became cash flow positive in just over 12 months. The second is tracking even faster. “At full scale, when we are at steady state for any one of our centers, those centers will return about, you know, anywhere from a mil to a mil and a half in positive cash flow,” Torben shared.
This is where the payer contract strategy reveals its full power. Healthcare businesses typically struggle with long sales cycles and slow ramps to profitability. By securing all payer contracts before opening, Uptiv compressed what could have been years of building credibility and volumes into months.
The company started with VC funding in June 2023, but as they scale, the model becomes increasingly attractive to private equity. Brick-and-mortar businesses with strong unit economics and clear replication playbooks fit PE strategies perfectly.
The Lego Lesson Applied to Healthcare
Torben’s career started at Lego, the Danish company that somehow thrives in a digital world where most kids operate on screens. “It’s a very creative company to work for and they pay attention to consumer needs like nobody else,” he said. “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.”
The core Lego insight that transfers to healthcare: remove every possible barrier between the consumer and the experience you’re trying to deliver. In Lego’s case, staying relevant to kids. In Uptiv’s case, eliminating the insurance coverage barrier before opening doors.
The Three to Five Year Vision
Looking ahead, Torben wants 50 to 60 clinics across the nation proving that hybrid in-person and virtual care models create better outcomes at lower costs. “I think that’s exactly what we are proving out in the Detroit market and taking that playbook across the nation would be very excited,” he said.
That scale only works because the GTM foundation is solid. Each new market will require payer contracts, but Uptiv now has 12+ months of outcome data, a proven operational model, and the credibility that comes from 150 referring providers and a 99 NPS score.
The playbook they established in Detroit, starting with payer contracts six months before opening, becomes the template for every new market.
What This Means for Healthcare Founders
The lesson here isn’t just about payer contracts. It’s about identifying structural barriers in your market and removing them before launch rather than after. That six-month investment in contracts created a clear runway that turned into 150 referring providers, 99 NPS, and cash flow positive operations in just over a year.
Most founders see pre-launch work as delay. Torben saw it as leverage. In markets with gatekeepers, complex partnerships, or regulatory hurdles, tackling those barriers first creates exponentially faster growth later.
The counter-intuitive truth: sometimes the most important go-to-market decision happens months before you go to market.
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