Digital Health: beyond early adopters
Digital health entrepreneurs can build the most efficient solutions possible. And the benefits their innovations bring to people’s lives and to the healthcare system as a whole are often clear and measurable. However, building life-saving, cost-efficient, sustainable and cool products may not be enough to penetrate the market and convince people to enhance digital health. At a time where expectations couldn’t be higher, how to go beyond early adopters and go mainstream?
A booming market
Almost all estimations for the digital health market are optimistic. According to the latest P&S Market Research report, we can expect a growth at a CAGR of 21.4% between 2015 and 2020, which is mainly due to growing funding opportunities and a major increase in demand for remote monitoring solutions and advanced information systems. But if we look beyond estimations, are people really using these new technologies?
According to Rock Health Digital Health Consumer Adoption 2015 report, half of American adults used one single type of digital technology, mainly online health information (71%) in the past year. The report states that “despite all the hype regarding mobile health apps, only a small percentage (17%) of consumers are tracking a key health factor in a mobile application”.
The digital health sector needs more adopters, not just for the sake of its economic growth, but for the evolution of products and services themselves, as entrepreneurs need to get feedback from consumers in the real-world in order to perfect their innovations and diversify.
The way to go
Interviewed by Hands On Telehealth, the digital health expert Dr.Saif Abed believes that using technology is mainly about lifestyle options. People build a certain lifestyle around technology, and in order to gain more adopters, entrepreneurs need to show consumers that the lifestyle they are offering is better in all aspects. The challenge is to do it in a discrete manner. Healthcare innovators should not directly try to change the behaviors and old habits of their targeted customers. They must promote patient engagement by building patient-centered products, adapting them the patient and not the opposite. Only then can they generate change.
According to Dr. Abed, presenting an innovative technology as being cool, disruptive and capable of changing the game is not necessarily a good idea in the healthcare sector. “A doctors would say ‘my life is hard enough as it is, I don’t need any more disruption’” Dr Abed says. The most important aspect remains being able to present tangible benefits, provide the best customized user experience possible and offer solutions to basic everyday-life problems. The best technology is the one that brings people to include a certain product in their lifestyle without even realizing they’ve made a change. And they end up preferring the new way, they wouldn’t want to get back. It must be natural, easy, simple and subtle. A consumer cannot feel that he is giving away what he already has in order to adopt a new technology. Therefore, it is very important to know consumer’s needs, worries and expectations. And for that, healthcare entrepreneurs need to be on the frontline, to talk to patients, hospitals, doctors, nurses, to experience and understand feelings and frustrations in the real-world. It is not just about conducting a patient-interview or quantifying a problem.
A specific group of early adopters
Moreover, and according to TechCrunch, the digital health sector has a very specific group of early adopters composed of caregivers and family members, besides direct users. This makes patient-centered designs and customized experiences allthemore important. Here, security and credibility for online health information website is a key aspect to convince these often risk-averse consumers.
These patients are in contact with each other. According to Rock Health, 50% are looking for online reviews of physicians before scheduling an appointment. Along with the rise of patient portals and forums, this reveals that patients have a certain capacity to organize themselves via online tools and trust each other’s opinions and advice. Healthcare entrepreneurs may need to adapt to this specific behavior, foster it and get their solutions to be approved in this spaces, just like a hotel would feel concerned with its reputation on TripAdviser.
More than numbers
As we stated above, the quality and effectiveness of a product is not enough in digital health. As Dave Dickinson, former CEO of Zeo (sleep tracking startup), puts it: “the gift wrapping matters as much as the present inside” (interviewed by MobiHealth News).
Since many innovations focus on health data and monitoring, the type of information that gets to the customers plays a critical role on adoption. Entrepreneurs must avoid providing customers with information that seems too simplistic or evident. This is an easy mistake as innovators tend to prefer simple and easy to use solutions in order to improve the usability of their products and conquer the market. “The more intuitively obvious the data is, the lower the consumer engagement will be” Mr Dickinson says. Unknown data will more likely shock your customer, thus alerting him and motivating him to take action and to want to keep using your product. This is essential to convince the mainstream to use an innovative product. The first customers that will want to use your product will most likely be interested in technology and may very well be satisfied with simplistic information, but not the mainstream. It must be more than just numbers. It is equally important to relate the data to something that is important to the consumer, and not just on the long term basis. Telling people they have risks of being sick in the next 20 years is not likely to make them change something or be more engaged with their health and, by consequence, with your product. But if you compare their scores to other people’s, alert them about losing performance or about their physical appearance, they might listen to you. Thus, entrepreneurs must understand what people react to and customize their product depending on that.
Lessons learned
If you are a digital health entrepreneur and you know that having a good product is not enough, we’ll thus leave you with some advice on how to go beyond early adopters and conquer the market:
- Be on the frontline: you don’t want to be seen as an outsider.
- Be subtle and natural when impacting people’s lifestyle.
- Build patient-centered products: adapt them to people’s needs instead of trying to change behaviours.
- Select the information you provide: shock your customers to get them to act and become engaged.
Do you use any digital health tools? Share your ideas with us.
Photo credits: vzwmiwestareas, homebt.
