Good afternoon! Last week marked the two year anniversary of the World Health Organization calling COVID-19 a pandemic, so we asked the experts to reflect on the way health tech products get developed and go to market has changed in that time. Questions or comments? Send us a note at [email protected].
Angela Yochem
EVP, Chief Transformation and Digital Officer at Novant Health, and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Novant Health Enterprises
Prior to the pandemic, health care companies and their software vendors were not generally known for rapid development of new functions, granular levels of responsiveness, fluid roadmaps or in some cases even iterative or agile creation methods. Because the consumers of their products were slow and careful adopters, there was no reason to optimize for speed.
The onset of the pandemic compelled these organizations to rapidly build new functions into their products and platforms, as they were forced to incorporate pandemic-related workflows, data sets and functionality in response to the emerging challenges. This tested their appetite for rapid roadmap evolution, their ability to quickly deploy, pivot and deploy again and their ability to make decisions quickly, while still maintaining highest degrees of quality.
Meanwhile, with change comes opportunity — and many new entrants joined the health care ecosystem during the pandemic, creating an environment of greater competition and increased fragmentation. So the general sense of urgency continued to expand, even as the pace of delivery caught up with the demands created by pandemic response.
As a result, speed is now top of mind for all health tech creators. Some have adopted a more rapid and iterative approach to product management, others have streamlined their path to launch of new functions or components and still others have significantly edited their planned roadmap for the next few years. But the most interesting change I’ve seen is the willingness to co-create solutions with a variety of entities across the health care ecosystem. Coopetition is the new way forward, particularly in the face of such enhanced competition, and my belief is that jumping on those co-creation opportunities with unconventional partners will be the way that every product company in health care (and other industries) will compete in the coming years.
Amit Phadnis
Chief Digital Officer at GE Healthcare
Yes.
Hospitals are under immense capacity and financial pressures. They need rapid plug-and-play tools that combine different data streams from different points of care to drive productivity and improve patient outcomes.
The rapid increase in patient volume from COVID-19 necessitated hospitals have a holistic picture of the resources they had available — beds, PPE, staffing, etc. In fact, at GE Healthcare we’ve had hospital CEOs remark that they’ve made more progress on digitization than they ever thought they would in the next five or seven years.
Looking ahead, the process of developing new technology is focused around utilizing the vast amounts of data that exists, refining it and making it interoperable so it can be combined with other data sets and third-party