Let’s talk about trust in our industry
Healthcare is a trust-based industry.
This is a fact we must remind ourselves time and time again. It’s why many innovations, as well designed and well intentioned they may be, fail to catch on while legacy technologies prosper. Convincing providers and the industry at large to adopt new practices and tools is often an uphill battle. Trust is not easily won.
This is why we’re excited to see innovators embrace this tendency of our industry. Like when SaaS startup Tennr made headlines for embracing American healthcare’s love of the fax machine.
But what happens when the industry’s most trusted names end up having the worst-performing technology?
Take this study that recently caught my eye:
- Yale Health researchers compared the performance of 6 early-warning patient deterioration predictive algorithms.
- What did they find? One of the worst performers came from Epic, by far the most common electronic health record (EHR) system across the U.S and the world.
- This comes as Epic’s market share continues to grow, further entrenching their brand and products—whether or not those products may perform worse than competitors’.
It’s easy to look at this story and grow frustrated. But I don’t think it’s reason to throw in the towel. To me, this simply speaks to how important building trust and brand loyalty is in our industry.
The lesson for medtech innovators:
- Even if you know you have the better product, that doesn’t guarantee your ideal healthcare users will switch.
- You have to keep building connections and trust in the industry, not hoping that your users will read the studies damning your competitors’ worse performance.
At the same time, we must keep pressuring our leading innovators to continue improving their products, especially when it comes to clinical AI. We can’t afford to leave patients’ health in the hands of less-than-stellar predictive algorithms.
When this technology improves—regardless of who develops it—we all benefit.
