What's wrong with mHealth? Ask Rube Goldberg....Part 2 2011-01-17 08:14:10

Six Principles for Accelerating Mobile Healthcare Adoption.

My last post described how mHealth companies are struggling because they’re spending too much time coining buzzwords and carving up pieces of the market.  They’ve lost sight of the real prize – near-term adoption.   This post, the second in a series of three, will provide some principles and suggestions for accelerating healthcare provider adoption.

The following principles are closely interconnected and no one principle is enough on its own. Remember, the end game is near-term innovation adoption.  As such, consider how well your innovation addresses each principle as well as how they intersect.

Principle One – Pick the right problem.

As obvious as this sounds, I continue to see companies get this one wrong.   Granted, it’s not an easy task.  It takes the discipline to say “no”  to hundreds of ideas.  It also requires deep observation and understanding of what people want to accomplish.   It takes some time but it’s well worth the effort.

To help pick the right problem, the 80/20 rule should be called upon often.   For example,  take a medical record (EMR or paper-based). What makes up 80% of a medical record? Have you ever really observed what physicians do when they meet with a patient?  Have you asked them about the process they use to make clinical decisions and the actions they take after reviewing a patient’s chart?   Where are they when they’re making clinical decisions? What’s the most painful and inefficient part of the process?

Ask yourself, is your innovation an aspirin (a must have to stop pain) or a vitamin (a nice to have).  In the healthcare space, it’s better be an aspirin.  Think about it, stopping pain as quickly as possible is what our healthcare system is built on.  From a psychological standpoint your innovation needs to address this notion head-on.

Principle Two – Align with the prevailing strategy.

Ask the majority of hospital CEO’s about their “strategy” and it’s a pretty good bet that they’ll say, “Reduce Costs, Improve Quality and Outcomes, and Improve Access (access to care as well as information).”  These are what I call the “predictable four.” With few exceptions, I’ve been hearing these same four strategic imperatives for the last 10 years.  Granted,  they’re far from innovative, far from creative, and far from putting a dent in the current woes of our healthcare system, but it’s reality and top of mind for most CEOs and executives.   Does your mobile technology address all of the predictable four?

Principle Three – Assess mission criticality.

If your mobile health technology can stop the pain of inefficiency, errors, rising costs and limited access to critical information, how many times a day will  a physician or clinician want to use it? Will it be used at least five times per day by each person that carries it on their smartphone or tablet? Does the technology transmit information that is needed to make a clinical decision that will be acted upon at least three times each day?

Principle Four - Create an insanely great experience.

Even if a customer wasn’t sure what they wanted until you showed it to them, a great experience will have them saying “ I have to have this.”  Remember, simple is beautiful and complex is ugly.

In a recent survey by the College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME), the percentage of CIOs expecting their hospitals to meet Meaningful Use stimulus funding qualifications has dropped by 50%.

Chuck Christian, CIO of Good Samaritan Hospital in Vincennes, Ind, and vice chair of CHIME’s policy steering committee recently spoke to Industry Week about electronic medical record (EMR) adoption and said,  “I don’t think I had truly gotten a really good understanding of, not just the effort it’s going to take, but the amount of organizational change that will have to take place around that.”

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.  Change is hard and our leaders in Washington got it wrong once again in an effort to incentivize healthcare providers to use EMRs.  Instead of dictating “meaningful use” requirements they should have dictated that technology companies create meaningful experiences for users.  A meaningful experience will, by default, create meaningful use.

Creating a great user experience is a collaborative effort where users/customers are involved at the earliest phases of the design and innovation process.  A designer doesn’t create an experience, they create a framework or artifacts to experience.  The experience is personal to each user and no one else knows about it until a user communicates it.  So, the user owns the experience, not the company creating the technology innovation.

It still surprises me to see many companies subscribing to a “build it and they will come” approach.  As I’ve said before, build it and they will come hasn’t worked since Noah built an ark.  Whether you want to use “systems thinking”, “design thinking”, or thinking thinking, get the owners of an experience involved on day-one.

Principle Five -  Target a profit center

Hospital margins are razor thin.  However, there are a few areas in hospitals that are a little more profitable than others.  These profit centers (e.g. cardiovascular surgery, neurosurgery, etc.) tend to have more resources available to put towards technology and services that enhance revenues, physician satisfaction, and patient outcomes.  Once your mobile technology is successful here, it is much easier to have it adopted across the organization because everyone else wants what the profit centers have.

Principle Six – Make simple and effortless the norm

In most industries, technology innovations typically improve on something and reduce cost — except in healthcare.   How does your mobile healthcare technology move the expensive and complex to affordable and simple (and improve people’s lives) ?

Healthcare providers are risk averse and pragmatic.  They’re scientist that are heavy rooted in data-driven decision making.   They are not incentivized to gamble and unless you arrive on a gurney in an emergency room, there’s a tepid sense of urgency when it comes to making technology, business or clinical decisions.

With this in mind, it’s critical that your mobile healthcare technology be simple and elegant and value-based.  Although there are a few ways to calculate value, the one that seems to work best is:

Value = Benefit/Cost – Effort.

Does the value of your technology exceed the risk and effort?   How easily does your technology integrate with existing technology (e.g. EMR, Lab Information System)?

How does your healthcare mobility solution meet these six principles?

Check back next week for an example of a potential mHealth sweet spot that’s been ignored.