Co-founder/CEO, SeamlessMD | enabling health systems to digitize patient care journeys with automated reminders, education and symptom monitoring - leading to lower LOS, readmissions, and costs | Physician entrepreneur
3 unpopular opinions I have about Digital Health: 1️⃣ Most research and grant funding in Digital Health goes to waste. I’ve seen health systems use tons of grant money to develop and publish research on the same types of digital health apps. And because they are often building V1 of a solution, the studies are focused on feasibility, and any analysis on actual clinical outcomes shows mediocre results. And then… they move onto the next research study idea. I’m not saying there should be no grant funding going to trying new things - but the government would be better off allocating a lot more of these dollars to health systems to just directly purchase the same types of solutions already proven to work. Case in point: that’s basically what the Ontario government did the last few years, and it now has higher digital health adoption than any other province in Canada. 2️⃣ Tech is commoditized. What separates success from failure is People, Process and Clinical. Most companies can build a nice looking app that meets the feature list of a health system. It’s why custom app development shops keep making money from healthcare despite no results on improved outcomes (nor do they care!). Dev shops view results as delivering an app to a client - not helping providers to achieve an outcome. Similarly, if you choose a Digital Health solution based on just a feature comparison, you’re essentially deciding based on who is better at writing product marketing. That’s like hiring a candidate based on how good they are at interviewing as opposed to their track record at past jobs and references from people they’ve actually worked with. Sure you could do it… but you will often be disappointed. What makes Digital Health successful is everything not in the slick product demo: → The quality of people → The proven implementation playbook → The alignment of the solution with clinical workflows → The expertise on clinical content and pathways … all the non-tech things that enable the Tech to work is what really matters. 3️⃣ Less is more: people, money, etc One of my favourite Paul Graham quotes is: “When people visit your startup, they should be surprised how few people you have. A visitor who walks around and is impressed by the magnitude of your operation is implicitly saying "Did it really take all these people to make that crappy product?" It reminds me of how some health systems have over-indexed on signals from Healthcare Venture Capital over the last several years. Some health systems got enamoured with high flying startups who raised hundreds of millions of dollars from big name VCs and scaled to hundreds of employees in no time. I’m not going to name names… but we saw how many of those situations played out. It turns out more money and more people doesn’t magically make one an effective Digital Health vendor partner that actually helps providers improve outcomes. *** Agree or disagree with any of these? #digitalhealth #healthcareinnovation
It’s crucial that funding drives tangible outcomes rather than just repeated studies. Investing in proven solutions can catalyze real change in our healthcare systems. Couldn't agree more Joshua Liu .
This feels peripherally related to the focus of research in academic medicine in general, where papers often feel like they’re getting pushed out for publications sake with that publish or perish mentality. The focus seems to be on origination of idea and publication with a steep decline in follow through and continued investment to in time, money, and psyche to iteration.
I see the biggest issue in trying to build tech themselves. Typically anything built in-house is not for longevity. It's a band-aid that requires constant maintenance, needs replaced often and takes away resources from true innovation. Most other industries figured this out already.
It is just astounding to see and hard to believe - reinventing the wheel, not understanding how one new app creates fragmentation and lack of funding to maintain/ upgrade it it creates another legacy problem….
I don’t disagree with you. There are so many grants out there so how can they be improved to still help foster innovation but have more of an impact?
Being unpopular ain’t always a bad thing!
Technology itself is commoditized, and the true differentiators for success in Digital Health are the quality of people, processes, and clinical integration—factors often overlooked in favor of flashy product features. Lastly, adopting a "less is more" approach is crucial, as having fewer people and funds can lead to more efficient operations and better outcomes, contrary to the belief that more resources automatically equate to success, which has been disproven by numerous high-profile failures in the industry.
Been saying this since 2015. Technology isn't "THE" answer, it's part of "AN" answer... So much waste and inefficiency is caused by policy and process. Easier and far less costly to approach from that perspective than it is to try to normalize and automate response to bad policy and process.
Agree! This is a lot like research on new mental health interventions or programs. Unless there is a local champion and effective leader, execution is going to be poor and outcomes are sure to disappoint.
Chief of Virtual Care and Digital Health
1wAmen