Why Health Systems Don’t Trust Digital Health Companies that Lack Clinical Acumen

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Posted By: Industry Expert October 2, 2024

Joshua Liu, MD

Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD
LinkedIn: Joshua Liu
X: @joshuapliu
Co-host: The Digital Patient Podcast
Musings and Insights

Healthcare is an industry built on trust. Not just trust between patients and providers. But the provider <> vendor relationship is built on trust too.

When it comes to Digital Health solutions, trust is built on a provider’s perception of a vendor’s clinical acumen – whether we like it or not.

When we started SeamlessMD, I thought our product demos would be judged by how slick our interface looked or how robust our features were.

The reality?

The quality and appropriateness of the clinical content in our product often mattered to clinicians even more.

Early on we would have example patient reminders that might make sense for certain specialties but not others.

We got frustrated when clinicians started derailing the demos to poke at the clinical content they disagreed with.

We’d say: “No no, you don’t understand. These are just examples, you can change the content to whatever you want!”

Of course, not every clinician saw it that way.

In a clinician’s mind: if we couldn’t get the clinical content right, how could they be confident we understood the needs of their patients in the rest of the product?

So we didn’t understand it at the time… but now we do.

It’s why today about 30% of our team comes from the clinical setting.

So that we ensure there is strong clinical acumen across company operations, including:

→ How we develop our clinical content and patient pathways

→ How we integrate that clinical content with our technology

→ How we design specific features and products

→ How we educate potential customer partners on our solution

→ How how we directly work with our provider customers on implementing our product, including customizing clinical content, algorithms and workflows

Which not only results in a better product that delivers industry-leading outcomes…

… but it earns and maintains trust with our health system partners starting from even before we partner.

So if you feel like providers aren’t trusting your Digital Health solution, ask yourself:

Is clinical acumen a true focus or simply an afterthought at your our company?

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.