Weekly Learnings in Digital Health

Digital health is arguably one of the most exciting industries right now in terms of innovation. Below you can find a quick summary of things I've picked up this week. If you have any questions or thoughts on the topic, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message so we can discuss things further. Thanks for reading!

Contents

1. Designing meaningful digital health solutions
2. Applying design thinking in healthcare

Designing Meaningful Digital Health Solutions

We can prance around and glorify digital health solutions as the eighth wonder of the world, but just because it's digital doesn't mean it's meaningful or valuable. Flashy design doesn't really mean anything when the application itself doesn't succeed in fulfilling a need.

That begs the question, how to figure out whether what you're building will have the impact you're after?

This week we learned more about building a minimum viable product (MVP) in healthcare and why to involve patients from the very beginning. This makes a company a lot more flexible to change course when user feedback starts coming in.

Whenever you're building digital products, make sure you can adapt to change quickly. It's the many iterations that will eventually yield a solution that, you know, solves something.

You can learn more about this exact topic from our episode with Alina Kubiak, marketing director at Alvo Medica on our digital health podcast here.

PS Funnily enough, it's also how we tackle projects at both Bothrs and Healthblocks!

Applying Design Thinking in Healthcare

Preventing infections from happening due to contamination still remains a major challenge in healthcare. The best way to prevent these infections is by using sterile equipment, always.

But in a hospital setting for instance, where there are hundreds of pieces of equipment being used constantly, things can get complicated:

?? Which instruments are being sterilized at what time?

?? How do you properly monitor and manage inventory?

?? How to provide ORs with the tools they need on time?

This time around, it's not so much about the technology itself, but rather how do you approach these challenges in a way that appeases all stakeholders? Design thinking is one such method of angling an issue exclusively from the perspective of stakeholders.

To then leverage digital technology to come up with a viable solution, once the challenge is properly defined.

You can learn more about design thinking on our Digital Health Podcast episode with Darci Mckittrick here.