Have you participated in the Perilous Pilot? You know, where your product has a fabulously successful pilot that turns into another round of funding/support, and then, well, nothing? I certainly have, more than once, and it made me make alliterations that were full of much more profanity. Then I had an experience where, by pure luck, I built a product completely differently and had a radically different experience. Now I think I understand why the Perilous Pilot is the rule rather than the exception in healthcare.
My hypothesis is that when we are building a pilot for the definitional customer, we believe we know what the product should be and how it will work, but we don't really know until reality slaps us around a bit. Therefore, we want to spend as little as possible on tech that we expect will need to be modified. So we invest in the basic functionality and user experience and iterate until it works. This leads to rapid and successful pilots. High-fives all around.
Unfortunately, we did not invest in all the security, governance, policies, and procedures because it would have slowed down the pilot. The definitional customer, who is likely invested in us in one way or another, implemented exceptions and safeguards on their side to enable us to implement the pilot in this way. But we do not have a scalable product: we have a proof of concept that now needs to be rebuilt from the ground up with appropriate security, governance, policies, procedures, and infrastructures in place that any CIO/CISO will accept into their IT ecosystem. This step introduces a significant gap consuming time and money that was not anticipated on the heels of the successful pilot. Enter frustrated stakeholders and profane alliterations.
The solution? Move the POC work to a POC and keep it a POC, nothing more. When it comes time to pilot, build a pilot product with the appropriate processes and infrastructure to scale--it saves immeasurable time, money, and heartache in the long run. The upfront cost is high, especially for a product that still has significant risk, so finding collaborative solutions to de-risk is key.
That is my hypothesis, but there are many folks out there with tremendous experience building and scaling healthcare technology products. Andrew Smith, Sally Ann Frank, Ming Jack Po, Leo Grady, Mudit Garg, Ed Gaudet, David Carmouche, MD, Edward Marx, Maneesh Goyal what do you think is the underlying cause of the Perilous Pilot and how can we make pilots more successful?
Read my full blog on the issue at https://lnkd.in/g55jTHug
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