Healthcare’s Next Challenge: Turning Innovation Into Adoption

Healthcare has no shortage of good ideas. Regulators are clearing AI-enabled tools in growing numbers, and new therapies and devices keep moving through pipelines. Yet a proven product can still spend years waiting to reach patients, held up by reimbursement, workflow and the confidence of the clinicians, payers and policymakers who decide whether it gets used. For payers, health systems, biopharma and their investors, the question has moved past “does it work?” to “will it be adopted, paid for and trusted?”

Our APCO team will take up that question at the World Business Chicago’s upcoming Venture Summit on October 20, 2026, where APCO is an official partner. This year’s summit is the first dedicated to healthcare and life sciences, bringing together startups, investors and industry leaders.

The most common mistake we see is one of timing. Most organizations treat reimbursement, workflow and stakeholder confidence as a launch problem, something to handle once the product is finished. The ones that scale innovation fastest, whether they are building it, buying it or bringing it into care, run adoption as a second development track, with its own timeline, its own evidence and its own risk of failure.

The stakes are financial as much as clinical. In healthcare, investors routinely assign billions of dollars in value to innovations years before they reach widespread use. But pipeline potential and market value are not the same thing. The organizations that create the greatest long-term value build the conditions for adoption alongside the innovation itself.

Organizations that get this right tend to work differently in three areas.

Evidence the Buyer Can Use

Approval answers whether a product works. Payers and health systems want to know what it saves, for whom and at what scale. In most markets, coverage is decided as much by government pricing, assessment bodies and budget pressure as by the data.

Organizations that build their evidence, market access and policy strategies together arrive at clearance with a reimbursement case in hand. Those that wait often restart the clock, market by market, while the asset loses value.

Health Systems as Co-Developers

The strongest launches start with a health system that helps shape a product around real clinical workflows. Venture and innovation teams that co-develop get earlier access, design influence and a stake in what works. Their partners get a deployment plan that a system can approve quickly and clinicians are willing to vouch for. That kind of endorsement is hard to buy later.

Reputation as a Business Asset

In health, reputation decides whether a partner signs, whether capital follows and how much benefit of the doubt an organization gets when regulators, payers or the public start asking hard questions. With scrutiny rising on AI governance, data privacy and pricing, organizations that build credibility with policymakers, clinicians and patient advocates early move faster on partnerships and deals. They also hold up better when something goes wrong.

This work begins well before scrutiny or crisis. It shows up in the way an organization talks about its model, discloses its data practices and engages critics rather than avoiding them. Organizations that treat it as groundwork are ready when the hard questions come.

One newer audience deserves attention. Large language models and AI systems now synthesize answers and shape which voices break through, often without anyone clicking through to the source material. Credibility is earned over time and through consistency across media coverage, third parties and AI-generated answers. In practice, reputation strategy now has to account for two audiences: people, and the systems that increasingly brief them.

What This Means for Dealmakers

These habits are also becoming a diligence question for corporate development, business development and investment teams. Alongside clinical and financial risk, buyers now weigh policy exposure and stakeholder risk: pending reimbursement changes, regulatory scrutiny and how clinicians, patients and lawmakers are likely to react. An asset that clears that test carries less integration risk and fewer surprises after the deal closes. For dealmakers, policy and reputation belong in diligence from the start, alongside the financial and clinical work.

Why This Conversation Belongs in Chicago

According to World Business Chicago’s “Chicago 2050 | A Plan for Economic Growth & Jobs,” healthcare is the region’s second-largest industry, and life sciences output has grown more than 60% since 2019. The region is home to national payers, major academic health systems, global biopharma and a growing health technology sector. Many of the organizations that decide what gets adopted, and increasingly build and invest in it themselves, already operate here.

The Chicago 2050 plan is also candid about a gap. Promising companies here too often find their growth capital, executive talent and corporate partners somewhere else. The region’s largest health organizations are well placed to close this gap as buyers, partners and investors, especially if adoption becomes part of how they decide what to back.

Healthcare will keep producing breakthroughs. The organizations, and the regions, that lead the next decade will be the ones that build adoption into innovation from day one.

If you’re building, buying or backing health innovation, we hope you’ll join the conversation on October 20.