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Healthcare Doesn’t Have a Front Door Problem. It Has a Follow-Through Problem.

So Fast Company ran this piece from the GoodRx CEO, Wendy Barnes, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Her headline basically says healthcare has enough front doors, what it needs is fewer dead ends. And yeah, she’s onto something. But I want to take it a step further because I think the real issue is even simpler than that.

Building the first step is easy. Anybody can do that.

Want a telehealth app? Build one. Want a price transparency tool, a benefits portal, a navigation platform? Go for it. The industry’s proven that a hundred times over. There are a thousand ways into the healthcare system now. And every single one of them shows up promising to make things easier.

But here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. Getting someone in the door was never the hard part. The hard part is what happens after. Somebody does a telehealth visit, gets a prescription, shows up at the pharmacy, and finds out it’s not covered or it costs way more than they thought. Somebody finds a cheaper price online and has no clue if their insurance even applies there. Somebody gets told they need a follow-up scan and now they’re on their own trying to figure out availability, cost, and how to actually pay for it.

That’s not a front door problem. That’s a continuity problem. And healthcare’s full of it because too many companies want to own their little piece and call it a day.

I think about this constantly in my own world. I spend my days connecting people, tech, and opportunity, and the thing I keep relearning is that the handoff is where everything either holds together or falls apart. Doesn’t matter how good your first move is if the next ten steps are a mess. Healthcare’s spent a decade obsessing over the first move. Meanwhile the actual patient is standing at the pharmacy counter trying to figure out why the number on the screen doesn’t match what they were told.

And so what happens? People delay care. They walk away from prescriptions they actually need because the price at the counter blindsided them. They start treatment with no idea if they can even afford to finish it. Every one of those moments is somebody who wanted to do right by their own health and got stopped by a system that was never built to carry them the whole way through.

Here’s what really gets me though. This isn’t even a healthcare problem specifically, it’s a mindset problem. Look at travel. Look at retail. Nobody launches a flight booking tool that just shows you flights exist and leaves you to sort out the rest. Expedia doesn’t stop at “here’s a flight.” It gets you booked, checked in, and handles it when your plans change. Retail apps don’t just show you what’s in stock, they carry you through payment, delivery, returns, the whole thing, without making you stitch it together yourself.

I get that healthcare’s more complicated than booking a flight. But that’s exactly why continuity matters more here, not less. When the stakes are somebody’s health instead of somebody’s vacation, leaving them to be the glue between five systems that were never built to talk to each other isn’t just bad design. It’s kind of a failure of responsibility, honestly.

And at the end of the day, that’s really what this comes down to for me. What happened to actually giving a shit about the patient. Not the funnel. Not the enrollment number. The actual person just trying to get better. No single company’s going to own the whole journey, Barnes is right about that too. But every provider, every pharmacy, every payer, every platform touching that journey owns a piece of the handoff. And right now too many of them are treating their piece like it’s the whole job.

The companies that figure this out, the ones designing for the moment someone gets stuck instead of just the moment someone walks in, those are the ones actually moving healthcare forward. Everybody else is just bolting another front door onto a house full of dead ends.