Decipher:HealthTech Ep 02 - Dr. Matt Sakumoto
CMIO, Virtual Primary Care Doctor, Startup Advisor
This is our second episode of Decipher:Healthtech; the podcast exploring the intersection of healthcare, business, and technology. In this episode we had an amazing conversation with Dr. Matt Sakumoto, a CMIO, virtual primary care doctor, and startup advisor. You can find more of his writings and thoughts on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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Show notes:
If developing a product in the services vertical having a clinical person on your team early can make a huge difference.
Credibility is key, know how things are supposed to look clinically. Making demos and prototypes look real can help develop credibility.
The clinical is almost never the buyer, even if they are the end user. You need an internal clinical champion but that is just the first step. The health system will be making the purchase. You need to appeal to multiple stake holders.
Clinical ROI is key. But there are also other system priorities you can appeal to (i.e. relieving staffing issues, patient access, DEI, etc).
Old data can carry old bias, be mindful of this and approach any algorithm with a health amount of skepticism. Test specific use cases early.
Diagnosis is hard but it is sexy. There are many lower hanging fruits in healthcare that solve significant pain points by relieving administrative burden. There is a lot to build that will free up clinician time and allow them to have more time to make diagnosis. There is value in that.
Regulatory environment in AI. The FDA will likely be the tip of the spear and regulate what gets approved for clinical use. CMS will control if clinicians can bill for using your AI.
FDA list of AI/ML-Enabled Medical Devices that Matt mentioned in the episode - LINK
Differentiating an AI based healthtech solution. Have some level of explainable AI. Be cognizant of costs outside the implementation. Maintenance costs and burden are a significant concern to healthcare organizations.
Change management/Deploying new tech. Preselecting internal champions. Have a bench of the “ready and willing”. Be available to support health care organization in the deployment process.
Finding clinical advisors/mentors - Matter, HealthTech Nerds
What is your wedge. Find a market you know well, then come up with a rational and defensible pathway to growth. The biggest market is not always the right market initially. Find a wedge first then grow it.
People process technology in that order.
Bring in a designer early. UX has long been neglected in the space. Patient experience is getting better but user experience on the clinical side is still pretty bad.
Execute really well on an acute problem that needs to be solved. Then expand to other problems.
Health systems are not the only customer. Insurance companies and pharmaceuticals have their own unique issues. Insurance companies are larger and have many patients; the usually maintain a higher evidence bar. Pharmaceuticals have issues outside of clinical trails. Patient identification through digital health solutions is a huge opportunity.
Wearable and other technologies are creating a huge amount of patient generated data. There is value is developing an analytics layer above it that will help provide novel insights. More data is not always better if it doesn’t result in actionable insights.
There is a lot more knowledge and wisdom from Matt Sakumoto in our full episode available on your favorite platform below.