This presentation is designed for those with experience in conventional startups outside the health sector who are interested in exploring the realm of health technology. The priorities and preferences of health tech professionals differ significantly from those of traditional startup professionals.
While this is not a comprehensive list of the differences between non-health tech startups and healthtech startups, this is a good starting point. We’ll start with the first bullet under tech startups, “Move fast and break things” is a saying heard often in the startup world, but it is not heard often in the world of healthtech. When people's lives and well-being are on the line, you should lean into a “culture of safety”, where security, privacy, equity, and safety are the priorities beyond speed and innovation. Non-health startups try to capitalize on new technologies quickly, and they have a strong desire to be on the cutting edge. HealthTech startups are typically years behind cutting edge, for very good reason. We’ll get more into this in the next few slides.
Next, we can compare the top priorities for these startups. Growing user bases or raising funding quickly is very different from the healthtech priority of facilitating or supporting quality care for the patient.
Finally, we can compare one of the most important things to keep in mind while doing work for a healthtech startup. People can die. Your users are no longer a self-selected group of people who want to use a shiny new piece of technology; they are now patients who may not speak English, may not be familiar with technology, and deserve quality care.
A great way of seeing the differences between a non-health startup vs a healthtech startup is to look at how they each interact with generative AI. For this section, assume the “typical startup” is a tech startup with a development team who are focused primarily on getting more users and impressing venture capitalists to get more funding.
I’ve had this exact conversation with multiple tech startup founders. For these founders, it’s often a no-brainer to implement this technology. Integrating with OpenAI’s API is quick, fairly cheap, and gives them the ability to throw around the words “AI” and “LLM” when talking to shareholders.
Now if you ask the same question to a healthtech professional, they are going to have a very different reaction. I could make an entire presentation out of the content I wanted to fit on this slide, there are so many considerations that seem obvious to a health professional. A lot of these considerations I learned about from this panel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xb8Q7_f7fE) where experts discussed their concerns for generative AI, and it is packed with information. It is well worth your time if you are trying to learn more about the healthcare perspective, or if you want to learn more about generative AI.
Moving on from generative AI, we will now go over some examples of other worries that a healthcare professional will have. This is a sobering list if you are coming from a lower-risk field.
Interoperability and EHRs are commonly talked about in the healthtech space, but many newcomers don’t know what they mean. An EHR, or Electronic Health Record, is a digital version of a patient's health information, including medical history, diagnoses, medications, and test results, accessible to healthcare providers for improved care coordination and delivery. Interoperability is simply the ability for multiple EHRs to work together. For data-minded folks, it’s the ability to extract and integrate data from multiple different datasets.
Interoperability is often discussed because many key players in the data space are not incentivized to make their data accessible, so the industry is left with tons of silos of information. This makes it difficult for doctors to share patient data from one clinic to the next.
A recent study shows that patients have several common pain points when interacting with telemedicine. The use of remote patient monitoring is expected to continue to increase in the coming years. Ease of access to care, alongside privacy and data security, ranks as their top concerns in 2022.
Care providers consider many different business goals when deciding on what technology to invest in. With the increasing rate of burnout in care providers, the external factors listed above are no surprise.
These are the things to keep in mind when you are working with or on a healthcare team. While it is always wise to keep ethics, bias, and equity in mind when working with any business; these are cornerstones to the success of patient care in any healthcare team, so these concepts should influence every business decision made and every line of code written.
If you have time, I encourage you to review the links above to dive deeper into these topics. The top two links are incredible resources for diving into the world of healthtech and starting to understand the motivations and concerns of healthcare workers.
