Learning from Agile Startups to Transform Healthcare
By 2050, the World Health Organization predicts more than 35 million new cancer cases, and over 129 million Americans already live with chronic diseases. Meanwhile, the process of developing new drugs or treatments remains slow, costly, and burdened by outdated systems. Startups, however, are moving fast, and there's a lot healthcare giants can learn from them.
In Healthcare Business Today, Nisum's Global AI Leader, Guillermo Delgado, explores how agile, AI-driven startups are reshaping the future of healthcare. Read the full article here: https://www.healthcarebusinesstoday.com/agile-startups-transform-healthcare-institutions/
Why Startups Move Faster
Healthcare startups operate on agile principles: small, empowered teams, fast iteration, and continuous feedback. They combine AI-driven solutions with cloud-based scalability to cut discovery and validation times in half.
Companies like AtomWise demonstrate how AI can outperform traditional research models, identifying new compounds faster and with higher accuracy. This is a direct result of agile experimentation: testing small hypotheses quickly, adapting, and moving forward without bureaucratic drag.
At Nisum, we've seen this same mindset transform enterprises. By adopting agile frameworks, organizations can shift from project-centric to product-centric delivery, ensuring that every sprint aligns with measurable patient or user outcomes.
Bridging the Gap: Lessons for Large Healthcare Institutions
Large healthcare organizations face a fundamental challenge: how to maintain compliance and safety standards while innovating at startup speed. The answer lies in combining agility with AI consulting expertise and intelligent automation.
Adopt Hybrid Cloud and APIs. Rather than replacing entire systems, layering new technologies allows for continuous modernization without disrupting critical workflows.
Empower Cross-Functional AI Teams. Integrate clinicians, data engineers, and compliance officers early in the process.
Focus on Data Accessibility: Make data a strategic asset by enabling secure, anonymized sharing that fuels AI learning and predictive models.
Embrace Agentic AI Moving beyond reactive algorithms, agentic AI can autonomously learn from real-world feedback, making clinical and operational systems more adaptive over time.
Implement Agile Governance. Replace lengthy approval chains with sprint-based oversight that enables both speed and accountability.
These aren't abstract ideas. Nisum partners with clients to embed agile practices and AI-driven architectures that enhance data flow, improve diagnostic accuracy, and enable real-time patient insights.
Human-Centered AI: The True Catalyst
True transformation requires keeping the human element front and center. AI must not only improve efficiency but also empower doctors, researchers, and patients. Startups achieve this by designing with empathy: using conversational systems to capture clinical notes, automating documentation, and giving patients visibility into their own data.
Large institutions can replicate this success by fostering innovation labs, adopting human-centered design, and creating feedback-driven agile loops between IT and medical staff.
The Future of Agile Healthcare
The future belongs to organizations that can balance scale with speed, combining the deep expertise of large systems with the adaptability of startups.
By leveraging AI-driven solutions, agentic intelligence, and agile delivery models, healthcare institutions can reduce time to innovation, improve outcomes, and modernize responsibly.
At Nisum, our AI consulting and intelligent automation services help enterprises bridge this very gap, blending agility with accountability to build technology that truly serves humanity.
