What is a Digital Doctor?

The role of doctors within health technology is varied and rapidly changing. Clinicians play a crucial role in developing successful health tech and their responsibilities are often multifaceted. Here are a few examples of positions/job titles in technology companies that doctors might hold. This list is by no means exhaustive- if there is another role you think should be added we would love to hear from you!

1- CEO/Founder

Doctors have an ingrained understanding of the problem and opportunity areas within the healthtech space. This makes them ideally placed to start companies and solve real world medical problems as CEOs and founders.

2- Medical director

A medical director is a senior role that oversees and takes clinical responsibility for a product or products. Medical directors will often be dealing with medical risk, clinical validation, commercial pitches, product development, research and clinical safety and regulation.

3- Clinical lead

The clinical lead position can mean different things in different companies. It may include a variety of responsibilities from clinical validation, clinical risk assessment, clinical operations, user research, product design and product management.

4- Clinical expert/Consultant

The clinical expert/consultant acts as a subject matter expert either embedded within a company or offering external consulting services to a company. They use their medical knowledge to help guide the development of software products. They may also author and edit medical content.

5- Product manager/Clinical Product manager

Product managers work alongside engineers, data scientists and product designers to develop, manage and improve software products. Product managers with a clinical background have a valuable skill set as they can provide insights into the problem space, communicate with both medical and technical stakeholders and understand how products can fit into the healthcare landscape.

6- Clinical safety

It is essential that any medical products are clinically safe, risk-assessed, and comply with safety standards. Healthtech products require the appointment of a Clinical Safety Officer who needs to be a clinician with current professional registration and experience in the application of risk management to clinical domains.

7- Regulatory/Compliance

Medical device regulation is an important and increasingly complex part of developing technology products. Regulatory/Compliance experts within tech companies work to ensure that all of their technology aligns with current regulation and that all of the appropriate checks and processes are completed before products are released.

8- Clinical Operations

Implementing, testing and managing technology solutions in real world clinical settings, ClinOps focuses on understanding and fulfilling customers’ needs and delivering results. It can involve designing, planning and physically running trials to test a new product or intervention. Clinicians on this team work to ensure proper planning, conduct, patient safety, data collection and processing.

9- Research

Research plays a very important part in validating and driving adoption of new medical technologies. This can involve research into potential new technology initiatives and determining how they can be applied to healthcare problems. It can also involve testing existing technologies to assess their effectiveness and clinical validity.

10- Clinical informatics

Clinical informatics involves managing the storage and communication of healthcare data. Clinical informatics specialists ensure that clinical information systems are functioning properly and work to make improvements to these systems to optimise data capture, interoperability, efficiency, data security and compliance with data standards.

11- Product design/UX

Product design/UX teams strive to design products that offer a great user experience. Clinicians have a lot to contribute to the product design process due to their experience of health systems and their appreciation of what users want and need in healthtech products- whether those users be clinicians or patients.

12- Commercial

One of the biggest barriers to launching a new product is securing commercial deals. An understanding of the structure of healthcare systems, how they are funded and how commercial decisions are made, is crucial to succeeding in this role. Doctors can provide invaluable insight into these key areas when pitching new products in a healthcare landscape.

What have we missed? If you are a doctor working in medical technology in a role you think we should add to this list please get in touch! We would love to hear more about how doctors are working to develop digital health solutions.

Author: Dr Annabelle Painter. DCN Co-founder