How to build a healthtech product as a clinician
Article by Saddif Ahmed, Medical Director of Clinical Safety and Accuracy at Flo Health Inc.
Clinicians have specialised insight into health and health care systems. While treating patients, we hear what’s bothering them, where they need more information or support, and when they come across stumbling blocks in the provision of health care.
With this experience, clinicians have a pretty good idea of which products could have the largest impact — either by improving patients’ lives or by making daily work for health care providers more efficient.
I have been a doctor for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) since 2009, working in different specialties. A few years in, I began my training to become a general practitioner (GP) and became a GP in 2018. Whilst doing that training and seeing around 40 patients every day, I also took night classes to earn a master’s degree in IT. Then I began working in healthtech, first at Babylon and now at Flo. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way, for any other doctors out there who are thinking about making the switch.
What to do when you have an idea for a healthtech product
There are two ways to go about creating a product for the health care market. But the very first thing you should do is check your idea with other clinicians and do your research to see if there are already similar products out there. You may come across similar products to what you have in mind that are poorly designed, and you can use this initial market research to figure out how to make a product work best for its users.
If your idea passes those tests, you can start working on the minimum viable product (MVP), a very simplified version of the product you actually want to build.
Option 1: Get funding to hire someone to build it for you
You can find a company to build an MVP for you, which will set you back at least £10,000 for the most basic type of app. As a clinician, you can seek funding from a few places:
- The hospital where you work
- Family and friends
- Nonprofit and government grants
Once the MVP has been created, most clinicians will do a small-scale release, only making it available within their hospital or clinic, to test it, get feedback from users, and conduct research to prove that it works and helps people. If that goes well, scale up.
Option 2: Learn to code and build it yourself
There’s also a more complex way to go about it: Learn to code and build the product on your own. Next, I’ll walk you through how to do that, from my personal experience.
The skills needed to build a product and how to get them
The number one skill you need to learn in order to build a digital product yourself is coding. And for that, you’ll need to take a course. I decided to pursue the master’s route and took evening classes. It was an MSc in information technology at Birkbeck College, University of London. It cost around £10,000 and took me two years to complete.
The benefit of master’s programs is that they’re generally quite comprehensive and can give you a broad skill set. I learned coding, design, testing, agile methodology, how to get stakeholder requirements and build an MVP, as well as the regulatory and legal side of building digital products.
What I found most useful about the master’s program was the final dissertation where I actually built an app and had one-on-one tutoring while doing it.
There are also online courses available on platforms such as LinkedIn Learning and Udemy that are much cheaper and quicker to get basic skills, but they’re not as comprehensive and the quality isn’t as high.
Whichever route you take, just make sure that you put your new knowledge into practice by actually building something. Don’t let that Udemy iOS course become a CV filler. Try new things and work on a product until you can release it on the App Store.
If you don’t have a product idea yet, here’s a tip: Think back to the times you’ve spent working at the hospital and wished there were an easier way to do something. Keep a note on your phone where you jot down things that hinder you in your practice or complaints that patients bring up. Soon enough, you’ll come up with a long list of product ideas that could improve health care.
How to build a health app step by step
After completing my master’s, I was asked by a hospital in Oslo to build an app for the anaesthesiology team. I built it alone — everything from coding and product design to legal requirements and regulatory testing.
The problem: Anaesthesiology is a very guidelines-driven area of medicine. For each type of patient (child, pregnant woman, healthy adult, adult with X, Y, or Z medical condition, trauma survivor, etc.), there are different protocols, medications, and doses. It takes significant time and energy for anaesthesiologists to search for the guidelines in textbooks or recall them from their memory.
The product idea: Build the guidelines into a mobile app to make it easier and quicker for anaesthesiologists to search for the right protocol in each situation.
Once I knew the problem and basic idea for the app, I started building it. Here’s how I went about it, step by step.
Step 1: Get the product requirements
First, I sat down with the team to discuss what they wanted the product to do and what they wanted it not to do. With my clinical background and technical training, I was able to give them a lot of guidance on what was and wasn’t possible for the app. For example, they wanted the app to be voice-controlled, but I proposed making a search bar that would allow them to find guidelines quickly, as well as a “favourites” page of the users’ most commonly searched guidelines.
Health apps are a special type of mobile product because they can directly impact a user’s well-being. “Safety by design” means that you build safety features into the app’s design to minimise health risks for users.
Likewise, “Privacy by design” is crucial for any health care product; in fact, it is a legal requirement in some circumstances. You should determine from the get-go what data you will be handling and storing and build in all the privacy features required, such as authentication for users, security features in the backend, types of data to store, and how to process them. All good tech companies, such as Flo, should have a dedicated privacy and data protection team, and they can be a fountain of knowledge when designing/developing features. Privacy and data protection should be assessed throughout the software development life cycle to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. A privacy policy should be easily accessible by users to reassure them that their data is safe and secure.
For this project, one potential safety issue was that hospitals can have a very poor cellular or Wi-Fi connection. So if they needed to connect to the internet to search or view the guideline, it may not work. To combat this, I made sure that the app was fully functional in an offline environment. Thankfully, there were no privacy concerns for my application as it was not storing and processing any user or patient data.
Step 2: Draw up mock-ups
After you’ve reached an agreement on what the product can do, you can work on mock-ups. There are digital tools for this (such as Figma), but the clinicians I was working with weren’t used to using digital tools, so they simply drew a sketch of a few app screens on a piece of paper and sent me photos.
Step 3: Iterate on the design
There will likely be a good amount of back and forth between you and the client where you discuss different features, buttons, and design aspects. Make sure that the ideas are possible to build and get to a point where everyone is happy before you start any coding.
Step 4: Create a contract
Now that everyone is on board, put it in writing. There are templates online that you can modify to fit your purposes.
These are the things I found most essential to include in the contract:
- The fee for building the app
- The scope: exactly what you’re building (include the mock-ups and product requirements) and exactly what you’re not building (what’s out of scope)
- The delivery time (e.g., “in six months, you will have a working iOS app; six months later you will have a working Android app”)
- Maintenance (e.g., “every year for the next three years, I will update the app so it continues to work”) and any changes that they can send you to build in to the app
- Testing and responsibilities for clinical safety: Write that you will only release the app after the client has sufficiently tested it and it’s been cleared for clinical safety.
Step 5: Build the app
Now that you have the requirements finalised, and everything is written down in the contract, the fun stuff can start: building the app.
This part is about putting all the mock-ups and designs into a fully functional app. It is a great experience to watch your app come to life. Clicking on buttons that do what you want them to do, displaying graphics and tools that look great, etc is fulfilling (if you are a doctor who learnt to code).
It is a great and rewarding feeling to be able to say, “I built this app!” and show it off to friends and family. It is still OK to get someone to build it though, as coding might be not for everyone.
Step 6: Test and then release
Before releasing onto the App Store, it’s essential to systematically test the app, not only to check for technical bugs, but also to ensure that it’s completely safe to use in clinical practice for different types of patients and that no harm will come to someone from following your app’s advice.
I set a comprehensive testing protocol by creating a spreadsheet with rows containing each guideline and asked the client to go through the app and test them one by one. They signed off as “passed” or “not passed” and then stated the problem if a guideline didn’t pass.
Step 7: Post-market clinical follow-up
As soon as the app is live, you need to test it again to make sure that it’s working as expected. Just like before, you need a clearly defined method and plan of how you’ll go about the testing and fixing any issues that may have been found.
This is a quick overview of building a product. But still, there is more to it, for example, which methodology to use — agile, waterfall, etc.
Tips for starting in healthtech
If you’re looking to work in the tech scene, having real experience building projects is the key to landing a great role. You’ll really impress your interviewers if you can actually show them something you’ve already built.
Taking out your phone, opening your app, and handing it over to them to play with is much, much more powerful than listing off theoretical information on how to build products. This is how I landed my first healthtech job as an AI clinician at Babylon Health.
Once you’ve got the job, my advice is to stay curious. The nice thing about working at a start-up is that there are always a lot of different projects happening at once. As a clinician, you’re in a unique position where you’re interacting with many different teams. Everyone comes to you for advice, and you can use that to your advantage by learning about what they’re building. Ask to sit in on meetings where there may not necessarily be a clinician otherwise to get a better understanding of the company as a whole and what various teams are doing to enrich your skill set. For example, I have learnt a great deal about regulatory, legal, and privacy issues by taking part in their review processes of new and old features at Flo Health.
If instead you’d like to build products on your own and create your own company, there are resources available to you. In the UK, we have something called the NHS Entrepreneur program. It’s a networking community to connect clinicians to investors and a training program to help doctors build medical devices and apps and become entrepreneurs. They teach you hard and soft skills about building products, including things like branding and how to pitch your ideas to pharmaceutical companies.
Why clinicians are the perfect people to help build health apps
As doctors, we have unique knowledge about what could ease a patient’s care journey or make clinical work more efficient. And that comes in really handy when building a health app.
I’ll give you an example. Before creating the anaesthesiology guidelines app for the Oslo hospital, I built an app for patients diagnosed with diabetes. Because of my years diagnosing and treating patients with diabetes, I knew exactly what these users would need to know and what functionality would be helpful for both patients and their doctors.
Even if you’re not the one actually coding and designing the product, it’s important to have a physician involved in product development from the start to incorporate medical expertise into the very fabric of the app.
Who we are looking for to join the medical team at Flo
On my team, we are currently looking for excellent clinicians with experience building products who can help us work on the app, from ideation to realisation.
Women’s health has been a very neglected topic over time, and many women feel like the health care system has let them down. We’re trying to fill a gap, educate users about their bodies, and screen them for potentially harmful conditions so they can get help when they need it. We want to develop new features that solve specific clinical problems that our users face.
Right now we’re looking for doctors (clinicians) with a couple of years of product experience working in healthtech and strong people skills. You don’t necessarily need to know how to code — we have engineers for that — but it’s helpful to be able to speak their language. Also, we’re opening a role for an OB-GYN (obstetrician and gynaecologist) who wants to move into digital health, even without product experience.
If you’re interested in working for Flo, have any questions, or want some guidance on starting your career in healthtech, feel free to reach out to me and check out open roles in our Flo medical team. And happy coding!
