Over the past few years, we’ve seen tremendous success with consumer-centric health tech innovations (the global market for wearables alone exceeded $61B in 2022), but overall, the industry has been less successful in developing the holistic technology hospitals and health systems need to deliver seamlessly integrated, digitally enabled care.
While interoperability has been top of mind for our industry for quite some time, providers are still burdened with having to adapt to an ever-changing technology landscape that complicates their ability to practice medicine. Health tech has often increased complexity instead of reducing it, and as a result, we’re contributing to the problem instead of solving it.
We have the potential to radically improve not only the way health systems deliver care, but at the same time improve the day-to-day practice of medicine for providers. For those developing health tech solutions for hospitals and health systems, here are three things you can do to help health tech live up to its full potential:
1. Build solutions with interoperability in mind from the start.
This means standard data models and robust API endpoints to systems that work seamlessly together and remove reliance on users to bridge integration gaps, truly living up to some of the legislation that has been passed andnot just addressing it with superficial compliance.
2. Design with a focus on the remote physician as a first-class user.
While this may sound obvious, more and more systems are designed with administrators as the primary audience because they make purchasing decisions. In many cases, telehealth point solutions have merely added to the digital fatigue, with poor UX inadvertently contributing to provider burnout.
3. Create solutions that can scale everywhere.
From the smallest critical access hospital to the largest health system, ensure systems are highly configurable and scalable with a low up-front investment. Right now, most software companies have decided to ignore a large portion of hospitals because only the largest health systems can afford ballooning implementation costs and large capital purchase requirements. At the same time, the largest opportunities are often inverse, with rural and community hospitals struggling the most with staffing shortages and poorly integrated technology.
Get more insights from Nijay Patel on this topic in his thought-leadership piece, Health Tech UX – Why We Must Keep Physician UX Top-of-Mind featured on HIT Consultant.
Nijay Patel
Nijay Patel serves as Chief Technology Officer for AmplifyMD where he leads R&D for our revolutionary virtual care platform. Nijay began his career at Epic, and more recently served as SVP of Product for Redox Engine.
