At Elation Health I led go-to-market for a clinical AI scribe, and the setup was tricky. Ambient scribes were everywhere, a new one seemed to launch every week, and ours carried a real premium over the standalone tools. On paper we were the expensive option in a crowded market.
The positioning move
I refused to fight on the same field. Every point solution sold the same promise: listen to the visit, write the note. But that note still lived outside the chart. You copied it into your EMR, logged into another vendor, paid another bill, and it did nothing for your coding or billing. Ours was the first scribe built inside the EMR. So I moved the story off "we have a better scribe" and onto a different question: should documentation be a bolt-on tool at all, or should it just be part of the system you already work in?
That reframe did two jobs. It made the premium make sense - you weren't paying more for a transcriber, you were paying for the note to flow straight into your chart, your coding, and how you get reimbursed. And it let me sell the vision, which was the harder half. This was before AI was everywhere, and buyers were skeptical. The scribe was the wedge. The real story was where an integrated scribe can go that a standalone one never can: once the AI lives in the chart, it drafts the orders, queues the labs, sets up the coding, and the chart starts doing the work.
What I owned and what it did
Positioning, outcome-based pricing and packaging, launch strategy, and enablement. It scaled to $3M ARR in year one and put Elation on the map for AI in primary care.