Over the past five years, as I’ve closely tracked how capital is moving into early-stage healthcare startups, one thing has become clear: the flow and structure of capital have fundamentally changed. Still familiar are smart, passionate founders and sound science.

Every few years, healthcare rediscovers the same uncomfortable truth: great ideas are not the problem. We have no shortage of promising devices, compelling data, or ambitious founders. What we lack—consistently, predictably, and at scale—is a way to move those ideas into real-world systems where patients actually experience the benefit.

Innovation matters, but it’s only part of the equation. The future of cancer care relies just as much on bridging the gaps between patients and health systems as it does on scientific breakthroughs.

Heath Naquin did a double take. Did the complicated tax changes he was reading through really mean what he thought they meant for the early stage medtech companies the Science Center advises? He started digging deeper and realized that these were issues startups needed to know about.