Medicollaboration - a better way forward.

#Medicollaboration is the practice of collaborating with a medical professional to produce tools that can be used to improve healthcare.

It is a term I have recently coined to bring clarity to a field that is growing and emerging.

First of all, Medicollaboration is not a new concept or practice.

In fact, many of the greatest inventions in #medicine have been a result of Medicollaboration – be it the invention of the MRI machine, surgical prosthesis, innovate health delivery systems and medical devices. Beauty happens when people from different fields (engineering, biostatistics, genomics, business etc.) come together to tackle the great challenges that humanity face.

The greatest breakthroughs are rarely the efforts of a sole individual. As humans, we have an innate bias to be attracted to the heroic stories of the single physician or inventor that brings to life great creations that changes the course of human history. When in fact, the reality of things is that behind each great story lies a greater #team of people working together.

Now, more than ever, we are in desperate need for better solutions and tools to help navigate our healthcare systems globally back to the right track.

As #physicians , we enter this field to heal and provide comfort to our patients. We rely greatly on many tools (that we often take for granted) to achieve this – cannulas, medications, diagnostic scanners, surgical equipment etc. With the advancement of digital and data infrastructures, we are also transitioning into using digital tools such as Electronic Health Records, digital appointment systems, PACS and a variety of software to order tests, plan treatment and prescribe medications.

Yet, if you speak to any healthcare professional, you will find that there are often much more complaints about digital tools that are unhelpful or clunky compared to the physical tools that we use.

If you are a clinician, I would like you to think about the last healthcare software that you have used.

·????????What percentage of features of the software do you end up using?

·????????How intuitive was the software when you used it for the first time?

·????????How often have your clinical workflow been disrupted just simply because you had no idea how to do something on a particular software?

One cannot help but imagine the level of involvement of the clinical end users in the development of such software or the lack thereof. Bear in mind, these are the tools that has actually made it to the stage of procurement – imagine those that have not.

Technology is the critical ingredient that we will need to address real problems facing us today, we need it to augment our abilities and increase our productivity in a climate of healthcare workforce shortages.

So, if we are to have the technology that we really need, the only logical conclusion is that as healthcare professionals – there is an onus on us to collaborate with others to develop the technology.

Let’s be real here for one moment. As healthcare professionals that has been trained specifically and intensively in #medicine , it is often the rule rather than the exception that we lack the real hard skills to develop software or engineer medical devices. Additionally, beyond just technical skills there is a need to consider the regulatory, financial, and legal requirements surrounding each piece of #technology if we are to implement it in the clinical setting.

It will be arrogant to think that having had no previous training in any of this area that we will be able to perform all the above to the required level. So yes, we do need to collaborate with others.

It is important to note that Medicollaboration is only one piece (albeit a very big piece) of the puzzle.

By involving and engaging with clinicians early on the inventive process, you vastly increase the likelihood of building a product that addresses a real concern, is actually useful and will be readily adopted by other clinicians.

Now this should sound quite obvious to anyone reading this, and indeed it was my initial assumption of how things were done. But with each consultation I do and with greater research into the field of HealthTech, I realised that this is not often the case.

So, why doesn’t Medicollaboration take place as much as it should?

There are some real and perceived barriers that I have noted so far.

1.??????The obvious reason will be a lack of access or network of clinicians in the first place.

2.??????Technically oriented developers are often more focused on the technological challenges, and whilst they are directionally correct in their development, they often develop overly generalised solutions that fits no one. Worse still, products that completely misses the point.

3.??????Clinicians themselves are really quite busy and may not have the time to collaborate.

4.??????There is a lack of awareness and indeed some suspicion amongst clinicians towards external parties that are trying to develop healthcare solutions. We are trained to apply a healthy dose of scientific scepticism towards everything we encounter to ensure we are only delivering the best care to our patients. I believe this bleeds in a little to the lack of collaboration.

5.??????A lack of understanding from the developers end about the complexities of the healthcare system and the clinical workflow process. Expertise and experience from another industry such as manufacturing, or finance are often not transferrable directly into healthcare as there are higher regulatory or clinical evidence hurdles to overcome.

6.??????Lack of funding for early-stage startups to hire/retain a clinical advisor on board permanently.

An innate humanistic bias is to gravitate towards the areas that we are familiar with, attributing it with more importance and paying more attention to it at the expense of understanding the significant complexities at hand. This gives rise to developers who are only focused on what they can build not what they should build.

Having said that, there is significant Return of Investment (ROI) to be had when involving a clinician earlier on. There are clear tangible benefits of Medicollaboration:

1.??????With a clear understanding of the key problems to be solved as told from a clinician’s perspective, companies save significant time, human hours, and resources as it will take a shorter time to build a properly useful product. This is opposed to building in a vacuum with no clinical input, adding features upon features that no one will need. It is not surprising when they present their product offerings to clinicians that they find it genuinely not helpful at all and therefore not something they will be interested to procure.

2.??????Another benefit of having a clinician onboard is that you will have the ability to tailor your marketing language to appeal to other clinicians. Healthcare professionals have conscious/subconscious bias and language that they gravitate towards. Having a “member of the tribe” speak and appeal to their own can work wonders in getting the early adoption that you need.

3.??????Moreover, with the recent crunch in funding in the HealthTech sector and also the growing experience of funding bodies in the healthcare industry, a key qualifying criterion for funding is to see if the founding team has any experienced clinicians on board to demonstrate real domain expertise. It can be difficult to take a team who is proposing to improve the way diabetes care is being delivered in the primary care setting seriously if they have not even spoken to or worked closely with a diabetes doctor.

4.??????The successful delivery of any digital health products relies on an intimate understanding of the logistics of the healthcare delivery processes. The truth is, you will need a clinical ambassador within the healthcare system to spearhead the implementation of your product and preach the adoption of it amongst their own colleagues. How are you to run a pilot programme in the hospital without having someone within it to oversee the clinical aspects of it?

5.??????Another obvious but true benefit is that it is far easier for a healthcare professional to approach another healthcare professional or even the health system. When you bring aboard another clinician, you leverage their network and connections. The tribe of medicine can sometimes be a very inclusive group where it is difficult for outsiders to penetrate. One familiar face can probably open more doors to opportunity for you than you think.

Let’s face it, Tech is hard, HealthTech is harder still. One simply has to find ways to increase their odds of success in such a challenging field. This is really where Adopt-A-Doc comes in. As a group of concerned clinicians, we are bound by a single thread of purpose – we know that better solutions are needed to fix our healthcare systems and the only way to get them is by collaborating openly.

There are a few key hypotheses that we are currently seeking to test and validate in our current offering:

Hypothesis 1: To deliver true value, the clinician being brought on the team ideally needs to be an actively serving clinician or have significant experience.

Now, some may not be happy about this sentiment but it is a pragmatic one. A fresh medical school graduate who has never experienced medicine in its entirety may not be able to bring to the table real domain expertise. Even more so if they left their medical careers at an early stage. A medical degree does not necessarily confer one with all the intimate understanding of how the system works or how care is delivered in one particular specialty. So tough as this sounds, you will really be looking for a true practitioner when possible.

Hypothesis 2: You probably don’t need a clinician to be on your team full time but on a fractional basis.

Now this really is borne out of pragmatism, hiring an experienced clinician full time will probably cost you more than you like. The creation process is often an iterative process where multiple ideation/development/feedback cycles occur. Having a clinical advisor on retainer where you can simply just E-mail or Whatsapp from time to time would likely serve your purpose well. Having a fractional Chief Medical Officer in the early stages of your startup may be more financially viable as opposed to a full-time hire.

Hypothesis 3: The right medical specialty for the right product.

Just as you would not go to a rheumatologist for a bowel problem, it is important to get the right kind of doctor on your team (i.e. Radiologist for a radiology focused solution). This sounds crazy obvious, but sometimes what you find is that the public perception of doctors are often skewed to think that there is significant overlap in what we do. This is not always true. Perhaps an experienced doctor will be able to perform “First Aid” to help your Healthtech products initially, but ultimately you will need the right doctor for the job.

Hypothesis 4: Trust is the key currency in which we operate.

Humans are curious and wary about others who we are not familiar with. Thankfully as healthcare professionals we do enjoy a higher level of credibility than most. But, to a newly minted company or a founder, there is actually quite a high trust hurdle to overcome given the stakes involved. Being a friendly, trustworthy face that they can rely on and having clear transparent processes of how we work will be the determining factor of whether a real relationship can be formed. After all, we are here to help.

Hypothesis 5: As clinicians, we have the responsibility to understand your challenges as well.

Interoperability is an important concept here. As mentioned above, clinicians are good at the thing that they do. But probably terrible at the other aspects of running a business or developing an app (though there are definitely exceptions). I believe there is an onus on us to understand how does the industry work, the language of startups and finance, the regulatory frameworks and the real challenges that these companies face. Only by having a common language can meaningful Medicollaboration happen, communication is not a one way street after all. It is arrogant to expect the other party to come and understand us without making an effort to understand them.

Ultimately, the value proposition of Adopt-A-Doc is this:

We will provide you with the Medicollaboration that you need in an unbiased, trustworthy manner. You can leverage our domain expertise, network, and real experience in the field. In exchange, we simply seek to form meaningful partnerships to help build the solutions that we need.

None of us can do this alone, and in such uncertain times, what Adopt-A-Doc is saying is this:

Hope everyone is enjoying their Easter weekend!