Zaazi just published a case study highlighting the importance of organization-wide clarity of a medtech company’s primary initiative. This primary initiative impacts the strategies of nearly every department and employee within the company. Yet we often find siloed teams in healthcare tech, with unclear expectations of other teams’ contributions towards the company initiatives.
When Zaazi was engaged for this project, we received what looked like a circumscribed task to complete. It would have been easy to dismiss the bigger picture of the organization and simply focus on meeting our deliverable.
But in our experience, healthcare tech frequently suffers from misalignment. Organization compositions are skewed either towards clinical medicine, or non-healthcare technology experience. These lopsided organizations underestimate the complexity required for building impactful technology solutions in the healthcare space.
Most of the engineers, product managers and designers working in medtech organizations have little domain knowledge of clinical medicine. Even when clinicians and technologists work together in the same company, they almost certainly won’t work on the same team day-to-day. We often see clinicians as “consultants” to the technical teams. But for this relationship to be effective, technologists must “know what they don’t know” about healthcare. Clinicians need to know what is possible with technology to ideate on innovative solutions.
Most working professionals are often non-retired (relatively young), able-bodied folks, with limited patient experience. Patients are an afterthought for much clinical facing software, despite the large impact these products have on patients’ lives.
All of these factors translate into miscommunication between healthcare tech leadership, their teams and domain experts. This misalignment manifests at the product delivery. Perhaps the product doesn’t solve the industry problem. The product may not scale. Or the product may increase provider burden.
Because this misalignment is so prevalent in healthcare tech and results in severe consequences, we always contextualize our work into the larger organizational strategy. While it seems simple to understand the core DNA of a company, it’s not that easy with a growing medtech startup. Initiatives can resemble a moving target with minimal documentation to clarify what exists. Financial restraints may have caused ancillary products. There is often institutional knowledge scattered across several tiers of the company. Sometimes it feels like investigating a company’s initiatives isn’t well received. This happens not out of malice, but because the nascent company might not have the ability to clearly articulate its longer-term plan.
It was during this push for clarity around the company’s primary initiative that we discovered an upstream dependency that would never reach completion. Not that the dependency would be delayed, or have to change form. It simply would never get done.
In understanding the larger picture, our project became irrelevant. Had we not done our investigation, the company would not have found the disconnect before it became too late to pivot. We come across this situation regularly. We once discovered a major security issue when building out a workflow of a fully deployed EHR. Another time, we discovered a product was built on improper assumptions while defining a small feature enhancement.
The more organizations we work with, the more I believe that everyone working at a medtech company needs to internalize the company’s primary initiative. The old “command and control” method doesn’t work in healthcare. When teams get siloed, the product becomes fragmented. Engineers must fully understand the company strategy behind the products they build. Product needs to understand how sales offers the product to customers. Sales must understand how their product affects clinicians and patients. It’s all interconnected.
I believe it is impossible to design a market-defining product in isolation for healthcare. The company must have access to diverse experience across unexpected domains like fintech or patient advocacy. The company divisions must collaborate on an almost daily basis. And at the edges of this communication, we must ask how the handoffs are occurring. Has the plan been vetted by the necessary stakeholders (not just internal!)? Do the immediate and distant outcomes of those discussions align with the company initiatives?
This is why we continually ask leadership about the bigger picture. We investigate until we thoroughly understand the vision and how our engagements impact that vision. We continually explore the things we don’t know, no matter how seemingly insignificant the task may be.