From the September 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
In addition, as a new technology company, not only is it crucial that patients trust you, but the industry must trust you. You want the industry to be able to send patients to you and champion your technology solution as a trusted resource and not one that works against them. This is crucial because patients wil,l in most cases, rely on a physicians’ recommendation more than anyone else. Technology cannot just replace that trust, it has to supplement it.
Personalized solutions
Integrating technology into healthcare is challenging because when dealing with healthcare you are often not just offering one simple solution. You are typically solving a myriad of problems that come from having one core issue, and every patient's needs are different. Understanding and accounting for that personalized level is critical but immensely difficult to do at scale.
Additionally, in healthcare you are often dealing with extremely sensitive patient health data, which creates barriers to entry not only from a cost perspective, but from a legal and operational one as well. You have to be set up in order to protect the information, while at the same time knowing that you have limits in utilizing it to further develop your technology solution. To make it viable to many people, it also has to prove beneficial to numerous players. It should bring unique benefits to everyone from patients, to administration, to surgeons. Everyone will have unique needs, but ultimately if it is smoothly integrated by everyone, it proves its worth.
Change is slow moving
Consumer tech moves at a significantly slow pace in the healthcare industry. There are many different parties involved in every step, and it’s futile trying to change that speed or disrupt workflows that have been set in place for a long time. A relatively small amount of change has taken place in healthcare technology over the past few decades in contrast to tech as a wider industry. This is in part due to the fact that healthcare has more regulatory and compliance requirements than any other industry. This paired with skepticism from industry professionals who are reluctant to implement anything that sounds like more work and time, makes for a tough barrier.
There’s no doubt that many hurdles exist when integrating technology in healthcare, but technology is the solution to overcoming clunky, dated systems that create these hurdles. It has the power to reshape one of our most backwards industries, if only it opens itself up to the ideas and innovation of outsiders.
About the author: Patrick Frank is the co-founder & COO of PatientPartner, a platform that connects pre-surgical patients with fully recovered patients who went through the same surgery. Frank has worked in consumer technology across a variety of industries including retail banking, law, real estate, and health care. He was also included in the 2021 Forbes Magazine 30 Under 30 list and PatientPartner was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Fast Company World Changing Ideas list for health care.Back to HCB News
