Healthy.io’s Kidney Test GTM Playbook

Brenda

Welcome to MATCH B2B Insights — the podcast where we break down what really drives B2B growth: business pain, personal risk, and messaging that creates meetings, not just clicks. I’m Benny Fluman, joined by Brian Newman and Brenda, and in this episode we’re diving into the Healthy.io case — a company that made a highly unusual GTM move: instead of just selling a medical product, it built a model that connects directly to money, pain, and the people who actually pay for the problem. I want to start with the part most medtech teams skip: the product itself. Because with Healthy.io, if you don’t understand what happens at home, with the phone, and with the sample, none of the GTM logic really makes sense.

Benny Fluman

Exactly. Most people start this story at the boardroom level -- payer strategy, partnerships, CEO changes, all of that. But the real unlock starts with a very concrete workflow. Healthy.io's Minuteful Kidney test is an at-home urine test. The patient collects a urine sample at home, uses a smartphone camera with app guidance to process the test, and then gets a result that can be routed into care. That matters because it shifts kidney screening from a clinic event to a patient routine.

Brian Newman

And that phrase, "patient routine," is doing a LOT of work. Because this isn't just, what, telehealth for labs. It's not a video visit and a PDF. It's a diagnostic workflow that starts at home and still ends in clinical action.

Benny Fluman

Right. And the FDA-cleared piece is critical here. By early 2024, Healthy.io had FDA clearance for the Minuteful Kidney test -- the first smartphone-based at-home urine test cleared for home use. So now we're not talking about a wellness gadget. We're talking about a regulated diagnostic workflow designed to detect risk earlier, before the patient ends up much later in a more expensive stage of kidney disease.

Brenda

So let me try to explain it back. The product story is not "we made kidney testing digital." It's more specific. It's "we made the act of screening simple enough to happen at home, guided enough to be usable, and structured enough that the result can actually trigger care." Is that fair?

Benny Fluman

That's much closer. I'd sharpen one word: ROUTED. Because a lot of health tech dies in the gap between test completion and clinical follow-up. Healthy.io's story only works if the result doesn't just exist -- it moves into a care pathway. That's why the product is the story. The GTM works because the product solves a logistical problem, not just a clinical one.

Brian Newman

And from a business development angle, that explains why the message lands differently. If I hear "home urine test," I might think consumer diagnostic. If I hear "FDA-cleared home-based kidney screening workflow that helps identify patients before dialysis-level cost," now I'm hearing operational value.

Brenda

Before dialysis-level cost -- that's the tension, right there. Because once you say that, you're not really selling convenience anymore. You're selling intervention timing.

Benny Fluman

Exactly. And this is where Healthy.io made the move that almost no Israeli medtech company makes early enough. They did NOT build their commercial story around the user channel. They didn't say, "Hospitals use this, so hospitals are the buyer." They didn't say, "Patients take this at home, so let's sell direct to consumer." They asked a harder question: who pays when chronic kidney disease is missed?

Brenda

And the answer was not subtle. Medicare spends 114 billion dollars a year on chronic kidney disease. One hundred and fourteen BILLION. That's the number that changes the room.

Brian Newman

And when you say 114 billion, the obvious follow-up is: who inside an organization actually feels that number? Because "payer" sounds neat on a slide, but in real life it's fragmented.

Benny Fluman

Correct. "Payer" is not a buyer. It's a system of buyers. Population health leaders care because undetected CKD means worse outcomes across a member base. Medical directors care because the screening model has to make clinical sense and fit standards of care. Finance cares because late detection is expensive. Procurement cares because eventually this becomes a vendor decision with terms, risk, implementation, and compliance. Same product. Four different internal conversations.

Brenda

Which is where a lot of founders get lazy, honestly. They think one deck is enough. But the population health person is not buying the same thing as procurement. Even if the contract is the same contract.

Brian Newman

Yes -- and this is where enterprise selling gets very unromantic, very fast. UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Clover Health -- those names matter because they tell you Healthy.io wasn't chasing applause. They were chasing institutions with both budget and pain. The user was the patient. The economic buyer was the payer. Huge difference.

Benny Fluman

And a very practical one. Hospitals may appreciate the technology, but hospital sales cycles in medtech can drag for eighteen months or more. Consumers may like convenience, but acquiring them out of pocket is expensive, and many won't pay for a test they think their physician should order. Healthy.io stepped around both traps. They went to the channel that directly absorbs the cost of untreated disease.

Brenda

So the commercial lesson is almost brutal in its simplicity: don't sell to the person who touches the product. Sell to the organization that bleeds when the problem continues.

Benny Fluman

Exactly. And in CKD, the bleeding is financial before it is visible operationally. That's why the payer says yes sooner than the end user would.

Brian Newman

Now, here's the part audiences usually romanticize. They hear the strategy and think, great, payer motion. Done. No. This only works if you can repeatedly reach the right people in the right accounts, build enough credibility to stay in the conversation, and survive a long, layered contract cycle. Strategy is the first ten percent.

Brenda

The "layered contract cycle" piece is important. Because one meeting with a medical director is not progress if finance never sees the model, and procurement never validates the vendor, and nobody internally champions rollout.

Brian Newman

Exactly. Success here is not "we got a meeting." Success is a SYSTEM. Targeted account selection. Stakeholder mapping inside each payer. Repeated outreach, not one-shot outreach. Assets that create trust -- clinical proof points, implementation logic, outcome framing. Then disciplined follow-up long enough to keep momentum while the buyer organization moves at buyer speed.

Benny Fluman

And buyer speed in healthcare can be painfully slow. Which is why I think the January 2024 CEO move is interesting, but not for the headline reason. Yes, Geoff Martin came in as CEO, with prior roles at Olive and GE Healthcare's Partners group, while founder Yonatan Adiri moved into the President role. Fine. Important. But leadership changes don't rescue a weak commercial system. They scale or refine the system that already exists.

Brenda

So when people point to the 190 million dollars raised or the 1 million patients served by early 2024, you're saying those are not just product validation numbers. They're evidence that the go-to-market engine had enough durability to keep converting interest into actual adoption.

Benny Fluman

Yes. Those numbers matter because they suggest repeatability. One million patients is not a clever pilot. That's operational follow-through. And then in April 2025, the acquisition of Labrador Health to launch the first quantitative at-home ACR test in 2026 -- that tells me they were extending the model, not just celebrating the first win.

Brian Newman

Let me push on that. Couldn't someone say, well, of course they could extend the model -- they already had money, brand, partnerships?

Benny Fluman

They could. But money does not solve message-market mismatch. Brand does not solve stakeholder confusion. Partnerships do not solve weak account penetration. The reason this case is commercially useful is that the machine appears aligned: the product is clear, the buyer is clear, the economic pain is clear, and the outreach probably kept showing up long after the first "not now."

Brian Newman

Which is the least glamorous sentence in B2B... and maybe the most profitable. "Kept showing up after not now."

Brenda

I'm writing that one down.

Benny Fluman

So if we translate Healthy.io into a business development framework, the sequence is very clear. First, define the ICP around the organization that owns the pain, not the user who touches the product. Second, build pain-based messaging that explains the product in operational terms, not just technical features. Third, map the stakeholder set inside the account -- clinical, operational, financial, procurement. Fourth, run an outreach system that gets in front of those people repeatedly and coherently.

Brenda

And that last part is the part Match B2B talks about all the time: strategy only matters when it becomes meetings, pipeline, and revenue. Otherwise it's just a smart document in a shared drive.

Brian Newman

Yeah, and I want to underline "coherently." Because a lot of teams do outreach, but it's fragmented. One message to one person, no sequencing, no account view, no proof, no follow-up rhythm. Then they say the market is slow. The market may be slow. But usually the system is weak.

Benny Fluman

That is the core message. Healthy.io did not win because they had a clever product alone. They built, or at least operated through, a system that turned strategy into meetings -- and meetings into qualified conversations with the people who could actually sign. That is the bridge too many B2B companies still do not build.

Brenda

So the hard question for any founder listening is not, "Do we have a great product?" It might even be not, "Do we have FDA clearance?" The harder question is: are we explaining this product in a way that makes the economic buyer care, and are we building the machine that gets that explanation in front of them often enough to matter?

Brian Newman

Because if the answer is no, then what you have is potential. Not pipeline.

Benny Fluman

Without a system, even the best product stays stuck in potential.

Brenda

That's the episode. Thanks, Benny Fluman. Thanks, Brian Newman.

Brian Newman

Always good.

Benny Fluman

Let’s leave it there. Thanks everyone