In November, our CEO, Michael Lazor, joined the HLTH 2022 conference in Las Vegas. This event is among the leading ones dedicated to disruptive innovation and transformation in the healthcare industry. Therefore, Mike spent some days discussing the future of healthcare with people working on up-to-date digital health projects and representing different businesses, from startups to enterprises.
So, what are the key insights Mike took from this prominent forum, and how should companies innovate in the modern healthcare sector? Let’s analyze that in detail below.
Promoting Equity and Diverse Perspectives
The proper development of healthcare solutions finds it critical to cover diverse perspectives and prioritize equity. Since the focus is on innovation, the more perspectives you have, the larger number of ideas you get. That allows for selecting the best possible idea and bringing it to life. Considering different perspectives can provide more benefits in the healthcare industry, where risks are much higher.
In such a case, organizations creating digital health products should focus on health equity and providing access to care. Although it can be challenging, effective healthcare apps can eliminate the gap when the nearest doctors are dozens of miles away. By leveraging analog opportunities, practitioners can spend more time with their patients, while the latter will get more touch points while obtaining care. The relevant touch points can involve data collection, review of patient information, and asynchronous communication.
On the one hand, that improves patient access to the healthcare services provider. But at the same time, doctors must check fuller inboxes, receive more notifications, and reply to more messages. Therefore, apart from bringing equitable access to care for patients, you should create a product that will provide healthcare organizations with efficiency to help them scale their audience and efforts.
Ultimately, in healthcare, a successful digital solution is one that makes a significant impact. And the exciting thing is that this impact may refer to a relatively small number of users. But it is necessary to analyze people’s experiences from various backgrounds before prioritizing which issues your digital product will solve.
Recognizing Complexity
When building healthcare software solutions, you must remember that most such tools’ target audience includes more than just patients. For example, healthcare providers and clinicians are also often primary users. That demonstrates the existing complexity of the healthcare industry, and digital products contribute to it.
What we considered the relations between patients, doctors, and healthcare facilities, evolved to cover more digital services. Thus, if you want to successfully adopt your solution in the healthcare sector, you should take the relevant complexity into account and embrace it. But that is just the beginning. Although patients and doctors can embrace your tool, and although it can get all required government approvals, the critical hurdles may remain. Will practitioners want to utilize another solution if they already use many to perform their tasks?
It means more than just considering digital health products in terms of improvements they bring to the care and treatment required. Besides, we must analyze their influence on the healthcare professionals’ daily workload and their ability to deliver high-quality care. Meanwhile, there is also a crucial need to pay attention to the patient side. And if your solution offers only a single virtual service, they will not likely use it.
Digital transformation goes far beyond providing access to virtual care. The fundamental goal here is to integrate care wherever possible and make patient information accessible as much as possible. Because of the global coronavirus pandemic, that became real. And today, innovative healthcare companies are those to leverage such a digitally-enabled reality within the industry.
Engaging with Users
Since software engineers lacking experience in the healthcare industry need to understand its complexity appropriately, they will fail in most cases. But also, those with the required experience aiming to create innovative digital health products can fail too. That is because they often need help understanding the basic working approaches regarding innovation.
Embracing innovation means you should have an open mind to address issues and not disappoint when proven wrong. For instance, the doctor can notice a particular issue to solve, but its significance for him, as a practitioner, will differ from the significance for the patients impacted. Therefore, the approach to addressing such a problem can be the one this doctor has never thought about.
That makes researching impacted stakeholders early an integral component of the product innovation process. After all, we need to engage with a sufficient number of users to assume we have defined the problem correctly. So, we need to determine the real issue to address before starting the development process.
Final Thoughts
Health is undoubtedly something personal. However, we should also regard it as a power that significantly impacts the whole population. And its future, where digital products will be widely used, will demonstrate efficient performance if we can promote sharing different experiences, cooperating, and strengthening expertise. Lastly, if we can do that appropriately, the healthcare sector will improve the world.
Do you have an excellent business idea for healthcare but need more expertise to implement it? Or are you facing some struggles with your current healthcare projects? Let’s book a call and discuss potential opportunities.
