Joshua Liu, MD
Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD
LinkedIn: Joshua Liu
X: @joshuapliu
Co-host: The Digital Patient Podcast
Musings and Insights
1️⃣ Implementing tech without getting clinician buy-in
→ Why would clinicians promote tech to patients that they don’t believe in? Hint: they won’t.
2️⃣ Clinicians and staff not investing the time to promote the digital health program (a.k.a assuming that “if we build it they will come”)
→ Patients listen to their providers. If you recommend them to use digital health, they will. If you don’t, they won’t. No different than other interventions or therapies.
3️⃣ Piloting tech based on a clinical champion’s personal interest… but those interests are disconnected from the priorities of the overall health system
→ If a clinical champion of tech cares about reducing ER visits but the hospital is focused on reducing length of stay… should we really be surprised if the hospital doesn’t continue funding the solution even if it does reduce ER visits?
4️⃣ Designing patient-facing digital experiences… without actual patient feedback
→ Clinicians often assume they know what patients want and will engage with in digital health… you’d be surprised about the things they actually (and don’t) care about.
5️⃣ Launching a digital health initiative without on-going maintenance and continuous iteration (a.k.a “setting & forgetting”)
→ Did you really think the work was done at Go-Live? A lot of the heavy lifting may be done, but no program succeeds without being nurtured. You’ll learn a lot about what’s working and not working after Go-Live, and will only succeed with continuous improvement of the program.
6️⃣ Doing tiny sample sizes that will produce so little data that it’s hard make a business case to keep going
→ Given that success with Digital Health requires continuous iteration, it makes no sense to do 25 to 50 patient pilot studies and conclude whether something works or doesn’t work. You have to go all-in and just keep learning and improving.
7️⃣ Prioritizing research goals over patient outcomes
→ In my experience, the health systems who achieved the biggest improvement in patient outcomes and cost savings with digital health are the ones who treated it like an operational initiative first and did research as a secondary benefit. The ones who obsessed over doing a research instead of just iterating to make it work… always had worse results. How you prioritize matters.
8️⃣ Implementing digital health programs with an unrealistic, research study workflow instead of the actual real world setting and clinical workflow
→ If you get research study coordinators to try to deliver a digital health program instead of actually operationalizing it with frontline clinicians and hospital/clinic staff… the solution just won’t be truly embedded into the clinical workflow. Your results are generally worse because your digital health program won’t have the mindshare or support of the full clinical/operations team it otherwise would.
What would you add?
8 mistakes that lead to failure in Digital Health: pic.twitter.com/PyIjH9amIe
— Joshua Liu (@joshuapliu) June 23, 2024
The Digital Patient
The Digital Patient takes an “edu-taining” approach to all things digital patient care. On this show hosts Dr. Joshua Liu, and Alan Sardana talk with healthcare, technology, and innovation leaders about the latest advancements in digital health, trends in digital transformation, and strategies for optimizing the patient experience.