What do you call a company with 10 million accepted AI diagnosis recommendations competing for deals against ambient scribes that have never recommended a single diagnosis?
You call it Regard.
And you call the reason they’re in that fight a positioning statement problem.
Regard has raised $81 million. Penn Highlands Healthcare reported a $7 million revenue increase after deploying it. Sentara Health saw 2 to 4x ROI with 65 to 75% physician adoption. Cedars-Sinai invested in the company. The product works. Physicians trust it. The clinical results are real.
But in the last four years, Regard has publicly renamed itself at least four times:
- 2021 to August 2023: “AI co-pilot for physicians”
- March 2024: “AI clinical insights platform”
- Early 2025: “AI clinical automation technology”
- Mid 2025: “AI-powered Proactive Documentation platform”
That’s not iteration. That’s a public search for a positioning statement without the upstream strategic work to support it. (Like watching someone try on four different Halloween costumes in the parking lot. At some point you have to pick one and walk inside.)
So the product keeps winning while the positioning keeps drifting. And that gap is expensive.
Why a Positioning Statement Matters More Than Your Homepage Copy
Most B2B healthcare companies think of their positioning statement as a sentence on their homepage. Something marketing writes. Maybe a tagline. Something you workshop for a day and move on.
That’s wrong. (And it’s why so many healthcare SaaS companies sound identical.)
A positioning statement is a business decision that marketing inherits. It determines which shelf buyers place you on. It shapes who you get compared to. It decides whether your sales team walks into a deal with momentum or walks in defending why you’re different from a company you don’t actually compete with.
When your positioning statement is right, the product sells itself because buyers already understand what it does and why it matters before the demo even starts.
When it’s wrong, your sales team spends the first 20 minutes of every call explaining what you’re NOT. And that’s exactly what happened to Regard.
The Smartest Move Nobody Noticed
Before we go further (because this is important): Regard made the single smartest positioning move in healthcare AI in 2025.
In October 2025, they partnered with Microsoft Dragon Copilot. And the integration revealed something that should have changed everything about their positioning statement.
Nuance Dragon Copilot handles the conversation. Regard handles the chart.
The scribe listens to the visit. Regard reviews the patient’s entire history before the visit begins. One captures what’s said. The other surfaces what would have been missed.
The product strategy knows exactly what Regard is. The positioning statement doesn’t reflect it.
The Seven Components of a Positioning Statement (Applied to Regard)
I use a framework based on April Dunford’s seven components. But I start one step earlier than most positioning consultants (at the moment the buyer decides the status quo is unacceptable, not at the moment they start evaluating solutions).
Here’s what that looks like for Regard:
1. What Buyers Are Actually Replacing
This is where most positioning statements fail. They define the competitive alternative as another vendor. But in B2B healthcare, the real alternative is almost never another product.
Regard’s actual competitive alternative isn’t Abridge. It’s the CDI team plus the physician reviewing 3% of patient data manually.
That’s the status quo. That’s what a hospital is doing if they don’t buy Regard. And the positioning statement needs to make that status quo feel unacceptable.
2. The Problem That Exists Before Anyone Evaluates Solutions
Here’s a stat that should be on Regard’s homepage in 72-point font: 97% of patient data goes unused at the point of care.
Patients contain an average of 50,000 data points. Clinicians review roughly 3% of that during a visit. The rest sits there. Unread. Unused. And inside that 97% are missed diagnoses, uncoded conditions, and revenue that never gets captured.
This stat appears in Regard’s blog. Their CEO uses it in podcast interviews. But it’s buried on the website. A good positioning statement brings this forward because it’s the reason Regard exists.
3. What Regard Does That Nobody Else Can
Ambient scribes start when the conversation begins. The doctor talks, the scribe listens, it writes the note.
Regard starts before the conversation begins.
It reviews the full chart (all 50,000 data points, not just 3%) and surfaces diagnoses the physician would have missed. Conditions like hypertension, malnutrition, and sepsis risk that would have gone undetected and uncoded.
Ten million accepted diagnosis recommendations. That’s not a marketing number. That means physicians reviewed what Regard surfaced, agreed with the clinical reasoning, and acted on it. Ten million times.
No ambient scribe can make that claim. Because scribes don’t diagnose. They document.
4. The Wrong Shelf Problem
This is where a bad positioning statement gets really expensive.
Regard’s current positioning language (“Proactive Documentation platform”) anchors to documentation. And documentation is a shelf that already has very well-funded tenants:
| Company | Raised | Valuation | ARR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abridge | $758M | $5.3B | $100M |
| Ambience Healthcare | $345M | $1.25B | — |
| Regard | $81M | $350M | — |
When your positioning statement puts you on the documentation shelf, every buyer mentally compares you to Abridge and Ambience. Even if your product does something fundamentally different. Even if the comparison makes no sense.
The shelf decides the comparison. Not the product. (This is the healthcare SaaS version of the Joker’s line about dogs chasing cars. Your buyers aren’t comparing you to who you think they are. They’re comparing you to whoever is already on the shelf you put yourself on.)
I call this the Shelf Tax. And there are three types:
The Umbrella Tax. Your positioning statement uses a broad category that includes well-funded adjacent competitors. Regard saying “documentation” puts them under the same umbrella as companies with 7x their funding.
The Feature Tax. Your most differentiated capability gets positioned as a feature of a broader category instead of a category-defining capability. Regard’s diagnosis recommendations (the thing that makes them fundamentally different) gets treated as a documentation feature.
The Status Quo Tax. Your positioning statement doesn’t separate you from the manual process. It makes you sound like “slightly better than what we have” instead of “fundamentally different.” And “slightly better” doesn’t survive a budget committee.
If you want to go deeper on how strategic gaps like this show up across marketing and messaging, read our breakdown of the $9K/day gap hiding in healthcare marketing strategy.
5. Where the Money Actually Lives
Here’s where it gets interesting. The clinical documentation improvement market is $4.2 billion and growing at 7.3% annually.
There are 6,100 US hospitals spending $300,000 to $675,000 per hospital per year on CDI labor. MDaudit reports $11.2 million per healthcare organization in at-risk revenue from coding inaccuracies.
Regard isn’t competing for the documentation AI budget. They’re competing for the revenue integrity budget. And that budget is 3 to 5x larger.
But only if the positioning statement tells that story.
6. What Buyers Say vs. What the Company Says
This table is the clearest signal that a positioning statement needs work:
| What Regard Says | What Buyers Say |
|---|---|
| “Documentation” | “Diagnoses” |
| “Time savings” | “Revenue” |
| “Unifying teams” | “Conditions we would have missed” |
When company language and buyer language diverge, one of them is wrong. And it’s never the buyer.
The positioning statement should use the words your customers already use to describe you. Not the words your marketing team workshopped in a conference room.
7. The Positioning Statement Gap (and What to Do About It)
Regard’s product has clear positioning. Physicians get it. Champions describe it perfectly in case studies. The clinical value is obvious to anyone who’s used it.
But the positioning statement on the website, the category language, the first sentence a buyer reads… that part doesn’t match.
Here’s what a repositioned version could look like (directional, not final):
Before: “AI-powered Proactive Documentation platform”
After: “Your doctors review 3% of the chart. Regard reviews 100%. Before the patient walks in, Regard surfaces the diagnoses your physicians would have missed.”
The proof points reframe too:
- “10 million accepted diagnosis recommendations” (not “10 million notes generated”)
- “$7M in recovered revenue from conditions that would have gone uncoded” (not “time savings”)
- “65 to 75% physician adoption because it changes clinical decisions” (not “because it’s easy to use”)
Same product. Same results. Different positioning statement. Completely different shelf.
Three Questions Every Healthcare SaaS Company Should Ask
This isn’t just a Regard problem. It’s the default state of positioning in B2B healthcare SaaS. Regard is just the most visible example because the gap between their product quality and their positioning clarity is so wide.
If you’re a healthcare SaaS founder or CMO, ask yourself:
In your last 20 closed-lost deals, how many times did the buyer compare you to a company you don’t actually compete with? If it’s more than 30%, your positioning statement is putting you on the wrong shelf. And that costs real money. (If 30% of 100 qualified opportunities stall due to wrong-shelf positioning, that’s $3 million in pipeline evaporating at the wrong stage.)
In your last 20 closed-won deals, what did the champion say was the reason they chose you? Pull the actual quotes. If the language doesn’t match your homepage, your positioning statement is lagging behind your product.
Which budget did the deal come from? Digital health or IT budget means you’re on the documentation shelf. Revenue cycle or clinical operations budget means you’re on the diagnostic shelf. The budget tells you which positioning statement the buyer believed.
The Shelf Tax Diagnostic
If you want to calculate your own shelf tax, here’s the process:
- Pull your last 20 closed-lost deals
- Count how many involved a wrong-shelf comparison
- Multiply the wrong-shelf rate by your average deal value
- That number is your shelf tax (the revenue your positioning statement is costing you every quarter)
Most B2B healthcare companies don’t run this diagnostic. They assume lost deals are product problems or pricing problems. But a surprising number of them are positioning statement problems disguised as something else.
Why This Keeps Happening
Your buyers already know what makes you different. It’s in their reviews. Their case study quotes. Their Slack messages to colleagues. Everything they say about the product when you’re not in the room.
The positioning statement work isn’t an invention. It’s listening to what buyers are already saying and putting it in the right place on your website, in your sales deck, and in the first sentence out of your rep’s mouth.
Position the problem before you position the product. That’s where the work starts. And when you get it right, your sales team stops defending and starts closing.
Want to see how positioning becomes messaging? Check out 150 real before and after examples from B2B healthcare companies.