Three leading players in the Canadian health technology sector gathered in a virtual conference to talk about advances and challenges within the fledgling industry.
‘The future of health tech’ was hosted on April 28 by TechConnex – a Canadian non-profit association in its 40th year, focused on the growth of tech businesses and their people.
It was one of a series of conferences which allow business leaders to share their best practices and insights, learn from others who might have similar challenges, and grow their business.
TechConnex membership development manager Kelley Phillips asked participants the following questions:
What are the challenges of creating new healthcare technologies?
Colin Hung, healthcare advisor at VentureLAB, a leading global founder community for hardware technology and enterprise software companies:
“I think one of the challenges that people don’t realise or recognise about healthcare is how it important it is that the technology fits within the existing workflow of healthcare conditions.
“A lot of times entrepreneurs want to disrupt the way people do things, and that’s really a good approach for the administrative side of healthcare.
“But on the clinical side, that’s actually not a good thing, to disrupt how people do things with patients.
“Because they’re based on tried and true methodologies that have been taught in med school, that are the ways they have to do things or need to do things.
“So it’s really important that when you’re introducing new technology in healthcare, that it goes with exactly how the clinician wants to do their work – it flows with their workflow.”
David Van Slingerland, CEO of Sterling Industries, a contract manufacturer and assembler of medical devices and sub-components:
“Where we’ve seen success is in devices that have a strong clinical mandate – so a champion, typically a chief medical officer or a doctor, leading what the device is and its intended use.
“The other thing is that you have to do your homework up front and cover all the stakeholder groups, so don’t just try to satisfy the clinicians but also nursing, administration etc.
“And the last thing is, go wide and deep. No two hospitals work in the same way. You really have to do your homework so that you’re not appealing to a thin sliver of the market.
“You really need to ensure that it will be widely adopted, and sometimes getting a different viewpoint will inform you as to how you want your device to work a little differently.”
Lauren Leon, strategy manager at MacKenzie Health, a hospital in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada:
“With any technology really, making sure that people understand what their role is and are able to support the change associated with it is really important.
“Starting from getting them to understand the value, and hitting on Colin and David’s points, that it really needs to connect to their workflow and be very clear.
“It’s not always a one size fits all approach with every type of organisation – really being able to customise or connect it to the groups so that they know how to use it, that it’s embedded in operations and there’s a way to sustain whatever is taken on as well.
“One thing I’ll highlight around what is the big challenge today, is really the massive system challenge of human resource pressures.
“There are not many people readily available to take on enhancements associated with technology.
“To implement any of these things, there is work required and while it is often brought in to create efficiency or do things differently, that upfront lift to get the work done can be a challenge.”
What are some of the challenges associated with an ageing population?
Lauren Leon:
“When looking at seniors, there are many that have a level of technology proficiency and it’s about being able to provide opportunities for them to be able to manage their health and to stay healthy.
“The more frail or complex seniors who need a lot more support or who also more generally challenged with technology, it’s about solutions that are more simple to manage.
“That’s when it goes beyond patients too and it’s linked to care givers and the role and how it can support a patient’s caregiver to support them.
“Knowing the patient audience you’re working with is definitely a really important piece.”
Colin Hung:
“This whole care at home or care outside of the hospital movement is one of the hottest areas in healthcare.
“We recognise that the home is a better place for people to heal and recover, and frankly cheaper for the healthcare system, so this is a really great area to get into.
“There’s a really blurry line between consumer technologies and traditional healthcare technologies.
“On the consumer side we have a lot of things like wearables that can track your heartrate and maybe monitor if your elderly parents are actually moving around in their house.
“Then on the other side you have true remote patient monitoring type of devices.
“All these kinds of technologies are very exciting.”
David Van Slingerland:
“[It’s important to] understand that today’s care models are integrated and how you share information from provider to provider.
“But also the wearables world and the ability to provide a continuous window of vital statistics is also quite informative.
“It’s an immerging place and the regulators have fallen behind in being able to approve and adopt the technology in their frameworks.”
