Joshua Liu

Yesterday I learned about yet another of our health system customers who presented results at a major conference, demonstrating reductions in readmissions by 50% and length of stay by 20%. We had no idea! We only found out thanks to Twitter.

Over 30 clinical studies or evaluations have been done by our health system partners demonstrating how SeamlessMD was used to reduce costs, length of stay, readmissions, etc. across a wide variety of clinical areas, such as orthopedics, cardiac, women’s health and many more.

Despite never sponsoring a clinical trial ourselves (this is truly the work of our customer partners!), we have amassed stronger and more clinical evidence than any other company in the market. Similar companies have surely done as many implementations as we have, and yet, the difference in results produced is stark.

Today it’s easier than ever to “build a digital health app” – but it’s NOT any easier to build one that improves patient outcomes

As someone who left medicine to work on digital health for nine years now, I can tell you it’s not hard to “build an app” for patients that has all the “features” that providers want in a Digital Care Journey platform – e.g.  reminders, symptom tracking, remote monitoring, etc.

What is hard is delivering a solution that patients actually use and drives a meaningful improvement in outcomes – across any clinical area, not just one or two.

So how are we consistently producing better outcomes than the rest?

It’s a good question, and one that I’ve asked myself several times a year. 

The truth is that it’s not one magical feature. We didn’t just wake up one day, build something new, and better outcomes just started rolling in.

Ultimately, I believe it’s because our team construction is wildly different from every other company in our space. We have far more clinical DNA.

Most Digital Health SaaS companies have the typical software team stack – engineers, designers, product managers, customer success managers, sales, marketing, etc.

Instead, we took the contrarian route in digital health and focused more on the “health” and less on the “digital” in our team construction.

At SeamlessMD, 23% of our team has clinical experience. Whoa!

Over the years, our team has included folks from medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dietetics and health communications. 

These folks are highly involved with designing and improving the patient experience, developing our evidence-based care journeys and working directly with providers to customize clinical content and workflows. It’s like having our customer partners working inside our company, all the time.

Contrast that with most companies in our space where there is maybe a clinical co-founder or a clinical advisory board. In reality, these companies have very few folks with clinical experience working in the trenches, every day, with the product team and customers.

“The team you build is the company you build”

– Vinod Khosla

I love this quote by Vinod Khosla because it accurately portrays the importance of team construction. Our clinical team has deeply shaped so many aspects of our product and customer engagement, most of which never came from some original plan.

It’s these clinical folks that invested deeply in an evidence-based approach – not only in terms of the clinical content, but also in how it’s delivered, such as infusing evidence-based methodologies for adult learning, health literacy and behaviour change theory into the patient user experience. 

And what happens when providers meet our team with such strong clinical DNA? Magic happens.

Not only does our clinical DNA make our product and company better, but it increases clinician buy-in and confidence – leading to more success and stronger partnerships.

A customer once told me:

“When I heard we were implementing your solution, I had some mistrust at the beginning because, in my experience, you’re usually talking to an IT person who has no clue what we as clinicians are saying. 

Instead, I was impressed with your clinical team, to have someone who completely understood our needs and goals, and could deliver it in a way that patients understand.”

As many digital health solutions fail to deliver on improving outcomes, the market is waking up to the realization that solutions must be measured on evidence, not feature lists. 

Two digital health solutions with the same “features” can have wildly different approaches to designing those features, resulting in wildly different patient engagement and clinical outcomes.

In the same way that health systems are led by interprofessional teams – clinical, administrative, digital/IT and many more – so too must digital health startups mirror that makeup of team DNA. 

Because when they don’t, we may be left with “yet another digital health app” that was full of promise but fails to deliver.