[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

Ryan,

I do a fair amount of work mentoring health tech startups. It is pretty clear to me that for these solutions to work best and for tech to have its greatest impact on healthcare, each side has to have a working understanding of the other.

I think medical staff has been so turned off by the clunkiness of EMRs and frustration with things like voice recognition that are supposed to make life easier but instead decrease productivity and increase frustration. Of course, that doesn’t have to be the case.

The corollary argument is that IT professionals and those working on the tech side of digital health have to understand the uniqueness of technology in medicine. Things that make sense in theory from an IT perspective may not fit well when practically applied to care delivery.

IMO, it should be mandatory for IT/digital health innovators to spend a week shadowing a doctor in the clinic/hospital and for doctors to take workshops on health tech principles. Finding a common ground is absolutely critical to success. Digital health is here to stay and we have to find a way to make it work.