3 unpopular opinions about digital health

Here’s three unpopular opinions I have about digital health:ONE: 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 (version one) 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.Read: Dr. Joshua Liu: Wouldn’t hiking FP pay solve a province’s primary care shortage?TWO: 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 peopleThe proven implementation playbookThe alignment of the solution with clinical workflowsThe expertise on clinical content and pathways. . . all the non-tech things that enable the tech to work is what really matters.THREE: Less is more: people, money, etc.One of my favourite quotes from Paul Graham, the American computer scientist and writer, 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 (VC) 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? (Answer in comment below). Dr. Joshua Liu is a Toronto physician and the co-founder/CEO of SeamlessMD. This item originally appeared on LinkedIN.

3 unpopular opinions about digital health

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