How to be wiser this time around
What healthcare can learn from the dark-side of disruption
[This is the first part in a two-part series on disruption in health tech]
When we started implementing and pushing our commercial offering at Medicus AI, we quickly and painfully realized that we faced a pretty big obstacle. Everyone we spoke to, everywhere from France to the Middle East, expressed the same concern: before they can implement Medicus, they would need to clean, unify and upgrade their infrastructure to be ready for our technology.
As it stood, systems were using different coding standards, norms and definitions, and getting any two systems to collaborate or be able to read each other’s data was a nightmare. We could see that this lack of consistent ability to share data across platforms or systems was severely stunting innovation. So even though it wasn’t our problem per se, it soon became apparent that it posed an existential threat to our company.
It was towards the end of our long and productive Q3 sales meeting last year, on one particularly breezy July day in Berlin, that we identified the crux of why clients weren’t signing. It’s not that they didn’t see value in what we were building, in fact, some were downright evangelical, but it’s that they couldn’t technically move forward. In theory, we had a growing list of excited clients, but in practice, we couldn’t get them over the line.
It was time for a break so I walked out onto the balcony, my favorite place to think, where I watched crowds and clusters of pedestrians, bikes, strollers and pets, each moving at their own pace and in their own direction. As I watched from above, leaves falling down from the trees, and people simply accepting that the gentle rays of the sun warmed their skin, it dawned on me: As humans, we don’t need to understand how things in nature work, like the trajectory of our feet as they leave the ground or the energy of the photons emitted from the sun, but we do need something we know we can depend and rely on, the consistent laws of nature.
But that wasn’t the case with our clients, who were forced to approach this problem like physicists. They were trying to delve so deep into the intricacies of it, trying to understand the different coding systems and data structure, and trying to plan massive infrastructure projects to resolve it, and it was overwhelming. In an ideal world, they would go about their daily business, focused on what they do best: identifying innovative opportunities and creating value for their doctors and patients.
Because the problem was so complicated, perhaps no one believed the solution could be that simple. Moreover, no one thought it to be their problem to begin with; everyone simply accepted it as an inherent challenge in the way technology works. But what I quickly realized was that we were the physicists in this niche, it was our job to figure out what to do, not theirs. Our clients didn’t need to be concerned with the technicalities of how to solve this problem, they just needed it to be addressed.
I quickly went back inside and shared my epiphany:
“Interoperability is not technically our problem, but it’s our biggest technical problem to solve if we want any hope of moving forward.”
I knew then, that if we didn’t solve this problem for the industry, true and sustainable innovation in the way we envision it would never take place. So we got to work…
As we embarked on the journey of solving this behemoth of a challenge, one that surpassed the product and company we were building, that relied on a bigger shift in the mindset, infrastructure and culture of our industry, we got to thinking about some of the lessons we could learn from other domains who preceded us in the cycle of innovation and disruption.
One example that kept creeping into our discussions was the infrastructure fail we are still witnessing today, both in Berlin where we were spending that afternoon and could see it clearly from our balcony, as well as Paris where today over 20,000 e-scooters litter the city’s sidewalks.
In an attempt to solve the growing mobility problem in big cities, the now-ubiquitous e-scooter industry ran before it could walk. E-scooters, while a seemingly brilliant carbon-neutral solution, arrived ahead of the infrastructure required to support its success — and cities and regulations weren’t ready. Scooters could be found dumped around cities, scooter accidents became a regular occurrence in hospitals, and people were struggling to negotiate the grey areas in urban mobility planning.
The key lesson here for healthcare actors that we drew upon is to plan and upgrade infrastructure first while pushing new technologies. Instead of forcing the product onto the market first and then waiting for the authorities or whoever thought that was their role to catch-up, health tech innovators should be working alongside regulators.
In part 2, I will share more lessons that we have been learning from as we build Medicus, and how they have come to serve as the guiding principles in our company building philosophy and the ethical considerations that drive our work at Medicus.
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