Building Multidisciplinary Teams That Thrive & Drive Success in Medical Technology

By Sherri Douville, Mike Ng, Eric Svetcov, and Anthony Lee

What do you do if you want to explore a new trail and you’re not great with maps, you might hire a trail guide.

What does a chapter manager do? They are a lot like a trail guide. Eric Svetcov, Medigram CTO/CSO calls them cat herders. “Trail guides and cat herders help focus the team and get the job done.”

“Chapter managers also get to build relationships and credibility with industry leaders while giving chapter managers confidence in their own competencies; this management by chapter managers is also critical for effective working groups.” –Mike Ng, Head of Operations at Medigram, Inc.

Success is often elusive in medicine and medical technology as we explained in this post with Medigram’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Arthur Douville about what success means in medicine.

What frequently prevents success in medical technology today?

1. A lack of effective management for complex multidisciplinary teams required for programs that underpin success in medicine.
2. A lack of collaboration due largely to lack of shared language and expectations across medicine, legal, and IT, engineering, information security.

Working groups underpin likely every successful program and quality improvement initiative in medicine. They enable complex multidisciplinary teamwork, collaboration, peer review, and quality management. These are all medicine “must haves” solving for both points above.

We are training and replicating this working group model across more than dozens of chapters in our books series.

Working groups rely on chapter manager-like roles to facilitate, lead, and deliver industry leading work that is compelling and impactful while meeting regulatory needs of a high quality medical technology publisher and the industry.

This drives a positive reader experience in their ability to get value and rely upon our books as something that makes them more effective professionals, boosts their careers and organizations.

Chapter managers ideally drive conscientiousness across teams.

Pictured from this McKinsey report are the skills often missing in team management and collaboration needed to succeed in highly regulated work. These skills are demonstrated and honed by chapter managers.

Image credit: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/defining-the-skills-citizens-will-need-in-the-future-world-of-work

From Sherri’s perspective as CEO at Medigram and Taylor & Francis series editor; whether you are a health system executive or healthcare IT vendor, one of the biggest general management medical technology pain points is onboarding technical staff and other stakeholders to regulated work. This is validated by many health system CxO’s. This system built around chapter managers creates for our ecosystem the skills, competencies, and confidence to lead through regulated work for real dramatic results. This pain point explodes in scope and urgency as scrutiny for privacy and cybersecurity practices gets very real right now. Implementation and execution of risk management (privacy and cybersecurity) is the ultimate regulated work which is why it is such an extreme team sport.

Brittany Partridge and Mike Ng, chapter manager council leads provide the examples of these analogous roles to help connect the dots.

Analogies:

1. Scrum manager (tech setting)
2. House supervisor/charge nurse
3. Keep trains running on time
4. Eye in the sky
5. Flow specialist- ED setting
6. Chief of Staff for technology company
7. Working group co-chair (as opposed to WG chair) or Secretary
8. Board of Directors Secretary

We hope this post helps you to understand and be able to easily explain to others why just like success in healthcare IT innovation is scarce, why a similar kind of work, success in healthcare IT publishing is fairly rare. This post explained the root cause, the necessity for extreme teamwork led through exquisite teamwork management.

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By coauthors of an advanced technology book series Trustworthy Technology and Innovation developed to address the grand challenge of trust that is on the decline according to several reports. This includes the longest running annual survey on trust, Edelman. As a consequence, there has never been a greater need for trustworthy information that informs industry leaders, physicians, academia, investors, engineers, scientists, and policymakers for global success in technology and innovation. Built by a proven, winning team and published by top academic publisher, Taylor & Francis; the aim of this book series flowing out of previously successful work is to set the standard for and demonstrate the highest targets for accurate information to deliver trustworthy technology and innovation; this is through a groundbreaking level of multidisciplinary quality and insight that informs, inspires, and helps drive towards practical solutions across technology, medicine, business, process, and people. We are guided in our work by the international Consensus on Quality principles for blogs and podcasts outlined in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Our work is also aligned with credible health source definitions and principles developed by a panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) , and reviewed by the American Public Health Association (APHA). This book series was developed by Taylor & Francis and is defined and led by series editor, Sherri Douville, CEO & Board member at Medigram, the Mobile Medicine company together with a robust ecosystem team. Our books are built by dozens of the brightest minds internationally across medicine, hospital administration, IT, information security, privacy law, informatics, leadership, academia, and project management to help health systems, investors, and other stakeholders identify, implement, and drive efficient and ongoing success with trustworthy technology and innovation. Learn more in our press release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221122005898/en/Medigram-Leads-Mobile-Medicine-Technology-Ecosystem-Partnering-With-Routledge-Taylor-Francis-on-a-New-Book-Series-and-Announces-New-Book-Advanced-Health-Technology-Our-Second-Consecutive-Book-to-Debut-as-the-1-New-Release-for-Medical-Technology