John Sculley, from Apple and PepsiCo CEO, recently addressed the Digital Healthcare Summit at CES about the challenges of delivering value to consumers in the healthcare field.[1] According to Sculley, Healthcare technology faces the challenges of bringing together people with technology skills and people who understand the unique consumer challenges in healthcare.
?The thing that is missing is getting the people with the domain expertise aligned with the people with technological know-how to turn ideas into branded services,? says Sculley. Otherwise, you may spend time and money on technology projects that fail to address the actual needs. He points to Google Health as an example of an idea that failed because of the lack of engagement between the technology experts and the healthcare professionals.
If experts from both industries can learn from one another, they could deliver products with real value to an industry in desperate need for reform. Sculley?s ?big ideas? focus on delivering usability, remaining persistent, and providing solutions.
1. Delivering Usability
?You never compromise on the user experience,? Sculley offered.
There is a tendency for developers to focus on impressive technological advances while failing to connect with actual users. For healthcare technology to succeed and make an impact, it must be usable by the actual consumer. Usability involves both meeting the actual needs of the user and delivering a solution that consumers can and will use.
This requires understanding who will be interacting with the technology, what are the needs that technology might address and how they will be using that technology. Developers need to engage healthcare industry professionals, healthcare providers and patients.
2. Remaining Persistent
It takes time to deliver solutions that people embrace and use. Sculley suggests, ?In high tech, there?s a very thin line between success and failure.? What looks like a failure today, may end up thriving in the long run.
?Failure doesn?t mean you?re finished. It means you have to pick yourself up and start again,? Sculley explains. He looks to the personal computer as prime example of technology that started slow and took over a decade to catch on. Microsoft developed a software platform that made computing accessible to the masses, and they experienced dramatic growth.
Healthcare technology has potential for that same dramatic growth.
3. Providing Solutions
?If you want to build a billion-dollar company, you have got to solve the multibillion-dollar problems,? Sculley said.
Delivering affordable and efficient healthcare poses a wide range of challenges for the wider culture. Technology can offer tools that address many of these challenges. How do we help create a culture of wellness instead of just addressing problems when they arise? Sculley see this as an opportunity and believes that patient care can expand beyond the encounter in the healthcare facility. He says, ?My thought is that we will be pleasantly surprised that we will find multiple ways to get chronic-care patients involved in their own care, but I can?t say when that will happen.?
Sculley is currently mentoring young leaders in the healthcare technology industry, hoping to serve as a catalyst for advancing developments.
[1] Neil Versel. ?Sculley: Health Tech Needs Usability, Not Flash.? InformationWeek, January 13, 2012 <http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/leadership/232400350>.
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Source: http://integracon.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/teaching-it-to-focus-consumer-habits-and-needs/
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