How to close the doctor-data scientist-bioengineer divide

This past year has shown the world how vital technology is to society and there’s no looking back. We’ve seen some impressive innovation in healthtech and ensuring that adoption continues to accelerate is paramount to improving medical care for all, but that will require education. While technology is becoming commonplace in some areas, it’s still an add-on in others and there needs to be greater thinking about how technology can be introduced earlier.

The digital transformation strategists are telling us that it requires cultural change, process improvement, technology, and workforce upskilling. But, more importantly, digital transformation, particularly in applications of artificial intelligence in sick care, requires close collaboration between multiple clinical and technology stakeholders including not just computer scientist but bioengineers too.

Why?

1. Creates better products and services
2. Understand each other's viewpoints and perspectives
3. Get customer discovery insights
4. Remover the barriers to dissemination and implementation
5. Provide physicians with non-clinical career opportunities
6. Bridge cultural gaps
7. Add demographic, psychographic, and cognitive diversity to the product development team
8. Assist with lead generation and converting them to sales
9. Social influencing and social capital of key opinion leaders and subject matter experts
10. Help raise money
11. Learn to be bilingual without an accent
12. Work with an ecosystem sherpa

But sick care technologists are from Venus and doctors are from Mars. How do we get them to rotate around the same sun and increase the centripal forces between them? How do we close this part of the digital divide?

Since they speak a different language, dating apps might help.

I recently received this note:

"I'm extremely interested in healthcare & tech. Can you give me advice on how to best set myself up to combine both & create impact as I am in the beginning stages of this path?"

Here's how we can close the divide:

1. Mandatory health professional digital health education and training and digital literacy competency
2. Project based interprofessional learning
3. Create more entrepreneurial medical schools
4. Recruitment, development, retention, and promotion of appropriate faculty
5. Rethink digital health technology transfer
6. Fix technology adoption errors
7. Cross the chasm with appropriate dissemination and implementation strategies
8. Overcome the barriers to AI/digital health
9. Measure data driven outcomes and impact
10. Rethink the health professional and graduate school business models.
11. Understand the differences in how data scientists think and how healthcare professionals think.
12. Find someone to reconcile the differences in mindsets and approaches to complex problem solving. How do you find people who are curious to be on your team? In fact, do you even need to get data scientists involved to solve your problem??A key to effective collaboration is to recognize which parts of a problem to hand off to the AI and which the managerial mind will be better at solving. While AI is superior at data-intensive prediction problems, humans are uniquely suited to the creative thought experiments that underpin the best decisions.
13. Create more opportunities for data scientist-healthcare professional interaction, networking and collaboration.
14. Create min-courses for data scientists in healthcare systems science and mini-medical school
15. Encourage physicians and data scientists to sign up on a problem board to form project based opportunities
16. Make it easier for physicians and data scientists to find jobs in healthcare technology sectors and industries

17. Make it easier for clinicians to connect with data scientists at universities, professional societies, local and regional ecosystems and social media.

18. Include clinical subject matter experts in bootcamp or product development teams

19. Intregrate bioengineers and data scientists into care teams

20. Improve knowledge transfer programs via sabbaticals, co-ops, internships and apprenticeships

In the case of bioengineering-clinician gaps, opportunities for improvement include:

1. Integration of clinicians into the project teams

2. Biomedical engineering curriculum reform to include technology commercialization and data science

3. Creating objective measures of pain

4. Rethinking the mission of biomedical engineering specialty societies to encourage more transdisciplinary education and training

5. Updated information about the outcomes of bioengineering undergraduates applying to medical schools (about a one-quarter to one third of graduates)

6. Better non-invasive, non-opioid treatments for chronic pain

7. Improving results of treatment of back pain, particularly in those patients who have had multiple back operations.(failed back surgery syndrome)

8. Educational exit ramps

9. Better knowledge transfer programs between academia and industry

10. Destroy innovation silos

11. Remote monitoring and management of pain

12. Better clinical decision support software and treatment guidelines and monitoring

13. Biosocial and behavioral care management platforms

14, Decentralization of care to address inequitable access to scarce and maldistributed pain management expertise

15. Primary care and patient education and training

Here is my data science-doctor collaboration wish list:

1. Start by being a problem seeker, not a problem solver

2. Play nice together

3. Educate each other

4. Find someone to lead cultural transformation

5. Remove the barriers to physician-industry collaboration

6. Stop frying doctors with your products and eliminate their burnout impact factor.

7. Make data literacy and data dexterity mandatory medical student and residency competencies

8. Engage patient entrepreneurs

9. Create a whole product physician non-clinical career platform

10. Reward the scholarship of innovation and entrepreneurship

In the meantime, here's how to get started as a sickcare entrepreneur.

The core of closing the divide will be interprofessional education and training, an organizational culture of innovation and digital transformation, and experience working as teams based on trust.

Hope is not a strategy. Technology alone will not get us out of the sick care mess or the global warming mess. People will; but only if they play nice with each other.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship