My observations and experience as senior Technologist working in health for over a decade leading tech change, leads to the following considered opinion.
Clinicians tend to be highly educated in a particular field, and due to their lack of IT understanding tend to diminish IT to being a utility, coupled with the psychology whereby educated people don’t like being told they don’t know something.
The result creates the perception that clinicians should lead technical innovation, and really discount the sophistication, talent, knowledge and skill required to design transformational tech, after all it is a clinical field and therefor a clinician should lead it.
The challenge is creating a space where clinicians are both comfortable and clear they cannot lead without extensive retraining, and that the most valuable place they can be is to get behind tech and provide their highly sophisticated clinical knowledge as subject matter experts. Tech giants who are changing the world don’t hire end users they hire techsperts to change the world for end users. The leadership/management paradigm is the wrong way around.
I feel like many of us clinicians feel morally obligated to stick to the status quo, anyone that tries something new becomes an enemy of our self-gratuitous egos - as if you can't mix business with health even though we all know health is big business. Several hugely successful healthtech innovations that are truly attempting to challenge the classic clinical business model are spearheaded and run by engineers, financial people, BDMs - not clinicians! Ask a clinician to innovate and they'll hire a bunch of doctors and build you a clinic with teleconferencing capability T_T
Great article clearly defining the challenges for Health tech innovation which is not only a challenge in Australia but globally. Until there are large returns to health care investors (think Atlassian, Afterpay, CANVA), healthcare innovation is less likely to attract risk investment. There are still too many regulatory and cultural barriers in the health care industry to make such a risky investment attractive to investors. I can't even get my cardiologist or ophthalmologist to send me an email confirming my appointment although they promised to send a letter in the mail which I never received.
Why is Australian Healthtech So Behind? - Part 1
My observations and experience as senior Technologist working in health for over a decade leading tech change, leads to the following considered opinion.
Clinicians tend to be highly educated in a particular field, and due to their lack of IT understanding tend to diminish IT to being a utility, coupled with the psychology whereby educated people don’t like being told they don’t know something.
The result creates the perception that clinicians should lead technical innovation, and really discount the sophistication, talent, knowledge and skill required to design transformational tech, after all it is a clinical field and therefor a clinician should lead it.
The challenge is creating a space where clinicians are both comfortable and clear they cannot lead without extensive retraining, and that the most valuable place they can be is to get behind tech and provide their highly sophisticated clinical knowledge as subject matter experts. Tech giants who are changing the world don’t hire end users they hire techsperts to change the world for end users. The leadership/management paradigm is the wrong way around.
I feel like many of us clinicians feel morally obligated to stick to the status quo, anyone that tries something new becomes an enemy of our self-gratuitous egos - as if you can't mix business with health even though we all know health is big business. Several hugely successful healthtech innovations that are truly attempting to challenge the classic clinical business model are spearheaded and run by engineers, financial people, BDMs - not clinicians! Ask a clinician to innovate and they'll hire a bunch of doctors and build you a clinic with teleconferencing capability T_T
https://anjuanand.substack.com/p/56-days-into-the-new-yeardays-to
Great article clearly defining the challenges for Health tech innovation which is not only a challenge in Australia but globally. Until there are large returns to health care investors (think Atlassian, Afterpay, CANVA), healthcare innovation is less likely to attract risk investment. There are still too many regulatory and cultural barriers in the health care industry to make such a risky investment attractive to investors. I can't even get my cardiologist or ophthalmologist to send me an email confirming my appointment although they promised to send a letter in the mail which I never received.