What Happens When a Technology Company Tackles Healthcare
By Matt Nunogawa
At Collective Health, we believe that we can build a stunningly good healthcare system. I’m here to discuss the engineering aspect of that lofty notion, but first, a small tangent on what makes our challenge different.
Collective Health is a startup with very unusual constraints. On the day we allow users in, our system must be secure, private and reliable. We’re not stealth, but we can’t launch fast and fail quickly. We don’t even say MVP because the surface area of our minimum viable is monstrously large. Our product must be HIPAA compliant, yet our internal requirements for security and privacy exceed HIPAA. Implementing a sublime, efficient healthcare system is a big, hairy challenge, but not an intractable one.
In order to meet our goals, we are building an engineering team that can properly balance quality and efficiency. We expect all of our developers to have a strong sense of the product. Each and every one is trusted with areas of ownership. They have both the freedom to work without micromanagement and the responsibility for the outcomes. Every engineer is expected to be constantly learning their craft and contributing to the collective knowledge pool.
In order to punch above our weight class, we invest in building supporting tools, testing frameworks, and believe in taking time to think and deliberate in order to build the right thing. Our architecture and platform choices are both modern and practical (such as the use of both Go and Java). We care deeply about doing code reviews and being sure the code not only works but is readable, testable and debuggable. Lastly, if our devs aren’t having fun, then something has gone terribly wrong.
Ultimately, we are striving to build something that people love. Doing so requires a strong engineering team, culture and product, but it’s the only way to improve on the incumbent pain and overhead involved with employer provided healthcare. If you are interested or have questions about how we are building out our system, please get in touch. We’d love to talk.
