Hacking the digital health CTO role

#DigitalHealth ; #HealthcareInnovation ; #PatientExperience ; #HealthcareCTO

1) What are the tech choices you as a digital health CTO should make?

2) What are the questions you need to ask when making healthcare tech decisions?

3) How does the Patient Experience (PEx) contribute to making tech choices?

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role and responsibility in product development is typically to make tech choices that improve the product and the business.? For a digital health product, the CTO additionally makes the right tech choices to improve the patient/user experience thereby improving the outcomes.

Many healthcare CTO’s get overwhelmed by the competing needs of a digital health product.? As a first time CTO on a digital health product startup, my northstar principles of ‘Keep it Simple’ and ‘Do it right the first time’ were put to the test.? There were at least 40 different choices of the type of technology to use for each step of the tech stack for design, user acceptance, development, cloud storage, testing and deployment of the product. These included many web-based and ubiquitous software-as-a-service products that had to be researched thoroughly.? Complex healthcare regulatory, security, privacy, product and business needs had to be incorporated into the technology decisions.? Where did that leave the most important aspect of the product, the Patient Experience (PEx)??

To get the PEx right, it's important to understand the patient's needs. Patient engagement and adherence can make or break the health outcomes so we want a digital health product to be easy and fun for the user.? Continuous feedback from users paves the way to a great product. ? Creating a scalable, modular, flexible architecture for the system that will respond easily to user and business needs is a critical undertaking.??

5 ways to accelerate the digital health transformation and improve PEx would be to understand patient needs, design and deploy the right tech data capture tools, streamline the patient digital health tech journey, connect the clinical staff and patient tech experience for a holistic solution and lastly, gather feedback from the PEx and improve continuously

There are many challenges in the healthcare industry from siloes (electronic health records, medical devices, wellness trackers, labs, genetics and vaccines), antiquated IT systems, issues with reimbursement, workforce and supply chain management problems, managing the massive amounts of patient data, and inefficiencies and errors in data sharing.? Furthermore, healthcare has a unique three party revenue model (Payer/insurance, Provider/doctor, Patient/user), so the patient who pays their monthly insurance premiums may not have a say in the choice of technology developed by the insurance companies and the hospitals.? In this three party revenue model, technology is often considered a fixed/sunk cost and return on investment for tech upgrades are not typically calculated, so the incentive to move to newer and more PEx friendly tech is not always at the top of the business priority list.????

Security, privacy and regulations are huge components of a digital health product. Given the rise of ransomware and malware security breaches, healthcare data needs to be under higher security as healthcare data is considered more expensive than financial data.? Privacy concerns are at an all time high and CTO’s may be more conservative when choosing newer technologies like Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Predictive Analytics. Understanding whether the tech stack supports the most current standards like HITRUST or HIPAA is crucial in the USA.? The EU has been an early producer of regulations governing healthcare products. Regulations, security, and privacy considerations are different for each country that the product will be deployed in. You need to choose the right foundational layer of technology, process and guidelines that can help to streamline the development and deployment of the product for the different privacy and regulatory needs in the different countries.??

Of all the Tech choices I made in my first startup, one of them was supposed to ease the often complicated process of getting the Digital Health App into the Apple AppStore.? However this particular cog in the software deployment cycle made the patient onboarding and PEx so difficult that we lost early users and had to replace the tech immediately.? We also lost precious time and hurt the brand of our product. That experience stayed with me in the next startups.?

My lesson learned is that the principle ‘Do it right the first time’ does make the product better.? However, this? principle does not work in continuous feedback loops where the continuous PEx feedback is needed to make improvements. The principle “Keep it simple'' works in many different situations and choosing the right tech to keep the product simple and easy to use is the right goal.

There are many tech choices for a CTO to make, focusing on the PEx can make a successful product.? The tech choices of whether to use a gaming platform to build the digital health app or use one cloud vendor over another can help make the product easier for the patient/user to use.? Making the right product with the best-of-class technologies and getting users to love it, thereby improving health outcomes and saving lives, is a blast and where I get my energy.? The products I work on get full-on support at a world-class level to resolve the problems, make the right decisions and get the outcomes they need on time and on budget.

Deepa Fernandes is a thought leader, serial CTO and healthcare tech strategy consultant. She has worked in Healthcare Tech Innovation across the different healthcare silos developing over 50 cutting edge products for medical devices, public health, electronic health records, non-profit and healthcare insurance.