Massively Better Healthcare’s Halle Tecco and Carly Newhouse were finalizing a foundational publication for startups, If and When to Hire a Chief Medical Officer: A Guide for Digital Health Founders.
Two days before publication, a gap emerged: they could find no credible up-to-date benchmark for clinical leadership across digital health. This data point was critical for helping founders understand typical company makeup across stages and business areas as a mirror against which they could compare themselves to peers.
Monday evening, Carly asked Aytza CEO Sari Kaganoff if a better source existed. It didn’t.
So Aytza built one.
The Aytza Approach
Aytza spun up a rapid market analysis to answer that question.
Determine the framework
The team assembled a dataset of 7,582 U.S. digital health companies, each having raised at least $1M, and defined the data fields required to generate insights.
Collect the right data
Custom Aytza agents scanned each company’s website, cross-referencing LinkedIn profiles and press releases to identify and validate C-suite clinical leaders (CMO, CCO, CNO, Chief Health Officer). Each identification was assigned a confidence score.
Overnight, the Aytza system built a structured dataset capturing clinical leadership across role, cofounder status, and company stage.
Generate decision-ready insights
The team built a live dashboard so the authors could explore the results and identify patterns across company maturity and other dimensions in real time.
The analysis uncovered a key insight: only ~20% of digital health startups had a clinical executive leader, far below the commonly cited estimate of one-third of these companies having someone in that role.
The Results
Within 24 hours, the authors had access to robust statistics across a market dataset more than 70x larger than previous analyses.
The guide went live with original, unique market-wide data that elevated the work and its impact.
"We had wanted to include a meaningful stat on founder clinical leaders but couldn’t find a way to do it, let alone in two days. This was magic! Halle and I can’t wait to partner with Aytza again."
Carly Newhouse, digital health thought leader and article co-author
