You may be familiar with this scenario.
You work in healthcare. Your job is to implement adaptable, cost-effective tech solutions to streamline operations, improve patient care and give your organization a competitive edge. But there are so many stakeholders, different priorities, legacy systems to consider. You want to work on more complex technology integrations that will be game-changing long-term, but you don’t have time for that.
Often, healthcare technology leaders like CTOs and CMIOs put too much pressure on their teams when the vendors they work with can ease the burden of a new software integration. In this article, Timor Marom, Head of Product at Agamon, shares three ways a startup software vendor can help ensure smoother and faster integration, and maximum return on your investment.
When you think you’re starting small, start smaller.
Unless you enjoy the thrill of seeing a flood of requests streaming into your help desk inbox, it’s obviously a bad idea to deploy new software across your whole organisation, all at once. Most of us are familiar with deploying on a small scale, and building up from there. Less obvious is the fact that however small you’ve made your test case, there’s usually a way to start smaller, which can dramatically speed things up.
For example, one of our partners, a private, outpatient radiology practice based in New York, wanted to increase radiology follow-up adherence. The practice provides services for around 3,000 referring physicians, so communicating with all of them was not an easy task. We began by identifying the criteria for follow-up recommendations that were the most important to communicate. The criteria could have been based on the recommendation type, the type of finding or the referring physician. In this case, we started tiny — with 10 referring physicians and only focused on MRI and CT recommendations.
Starting this small meant that we and our customer could quickly iron out integration and onboarding processes, train staff and ensure things ran smoothly when we eventually broadened the scope.
Ask for customization.
Working with healthcare systems of different sizes, in different countries, you quickly learn that no two healthcare providers are the same. Each has its own organization structure, a unique customer offering, and its own way of handling processes and priorities.
Hence, the solution you’re considering should be adaptable to your unique situation, so you’re not having to re-design processes and systems to fit the product. A truly customizable solution will also be adaptable to your future plans: so make sure to have an open conversation with your vendor about your growth targets, and how you can empower each other with continued support and evolution as your organisations evolve.
As a bonus, a customizable solution also heavily reduces IT burden within your organization, as implementation can be managed by your operations team without the need for IT resources.
We’ve already tried, so you don’t have to.
Organizations build their own solutions to try to save time and money. But often, as an organization grows to serve more patients and operate in more locations, their internal solution fails, or is unable to keep up with larger volume and complexity.
Technology companies are technology specialists. We build a solution to solve a problem, and get the opportunity to use every deployment as a chance to iterate and improve our products. On top of learning from deployments and user feedback, the deep learning models that power Agamon technology also benefit from the “data network effect” — growing smarter as they get exposed to more data (in this case, tens of millions of radiology reports).
So every time we implement Agamon technology across a new organization, that new customer benefits from the feedback and improvements gained with every previous deployment.
About the author: Timor Marom is Head of Product at Agamon. Her success in launching AI-powered technology into the Healthcare and Fintech industries has been based on acquiring a deep understanding of both the applications of Artificial Intelligence, and the practical and emotional aspects of a users’ product experience. As Head of Product at Agamon, she is applying her user-centered approach to building tools that solve real problems and deliver true value for the medical industry.
