The health IT field is exploding with new ideas for almost every problem under the sun. But are the digital solutions actually beneficial? And do they enable a positive user experience? Not all the time.
Though there’s plenty of hype around technologies like AI, they have in some cases been thrown into healthcare without a thought as to how physicians and patients will interact with them.
“If you just introduce technologies but don’t embed them in a practical user experience, they’re not going to be helpful,” Lúcia Soares, managing director at Health2047, said in a recent phone interview.
The Menlo Park, California-based organization seeks to transform healthcare in the United States by developing solutions in a few key areas: data liquidity, chronic disease, productivity and value-based payments. Earlier this year, it raised $27.2 million in follow-on funding from the American Medical Association.
The healthcare user experience is lagging for a few reasons. Part of it has to do with a fundamental aspect of the field: the human touch.
“At the heart of medicine and at the heart of the physician encountering patients is the human touch,” Soares said. “We need to make sure the technology is actually empowering the human touch and not taking away from it.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The tech has forgotten it has to come second to the touch and care aspects of healthcare, she added.
Another reason for the lag has to do with the complexity of the system. A hospital can have a plethora of digital tools and solutions. But most of healthcare itself takes place in the individual’s home and community, Soares said. New solutions can’t only be in the health system. To have a greater impact, they should be with patients.
The question remains: What can the industry do to improve the user experience? The key is to better understand the field and the desired outcomes.
“There’s always a higher purpose in healthcare,” Soares said. “We want to cure somebody. When technology is deployed, we need to understand we’re in a mission-oriented business.”
Photo: Chunumunu, Getty Images
