The global pandemic has accelerated the digitisation of the healthcare sector in a way that no-one could have adequately predicted.
As with any rapidly expanding industry where funding and ambition outpace emerging expertise, the race for talent in digital health is fierce.
For companies who seek to succeed, there is a natural temptation to look outwards for a digital tech superstar to shepherd the organisation through what can be a very uncomfortable transformation.
To that extent, the sector has seen a few high-profile moves, only for its Chief Digital Officer (or analogue) to depart abruptly a couple of years later.
In parallel, ambition and commitment drive many healthcare organisations to fill the ranks of their newly founded departments with scores of the best and brightest tech talent, only to see them leave in frustration a couple of years later.
After repeating this cycle a few times, company leadership starts to wonder what is behind this phenomenon and, more importantly, what it really takes to get it right.
An overreliance on external digital health talent, regardless of how brilliant, neglects the essential truth that the large majority of tomorrow’s digital health workforce will need to be made, not hired.
One or two luminaries, or even a whole department, cannot successfully build out a foray into a brand-new space while that same effort remains a mystery to its parent enterprise.
Likewise, winning the ultra-competitive race to hire the first crop of new tech talent into freshly founded departments is not worth the time and effort, if there is no overarching strategic vision, and if functions are not effectively activated and integrated with the core business through new operating models and structures.
Digital transformation cannot be delegated to a few individuals; for an enterprise to evolve and renew itself, it needs to secure the commitment and effort of every single person in the workforce.
In order to advance in this new field that is marked by ambiguity and volatility, companies need to be able to harness and combine both traditional and foreign disciplines effectively to problem-solve along the way.
And while subject matter expertise is important, acquiring enough technical knowledge to get by is relatively achievable for all but the most specialised experts.
What is much harder to build is the unabashed curiosity, humility, and growth mindset it requires to embark on this journey in the first place. In consequence, empathy, communication, and coaching skills are essential for leaders when success depends on bringing everyone along this significant learning curve.
These character traits and experiences are what will make future leaders successful and what recruiters and managers who seek to hire and promote should look out for.
Despite the novelty of the endeavour, there are a lot of candidates who already possess relevant technical expertise across parts of the key disciplines in digital health, bringing large-scale talent re-skilling further into the realm of possibility.
The right people already work in the different industries who vie for the space: big tech, big healthcare, and all sorts of startups in between. But no matter their background, every candidate will need to show the will and discipline to upskill in areas they’re unfamiliar with.
For big tech, mainstay roles such as product management, engineering, and cybersecurity do not only have to integrate with unfamiliar healthcare functions, such as clinical, medical, regulatory, reimbursement, and healthcare compliance, but its leaders also have to entirely rethink their ways of working to accommodate the strictly regulated, linear, and documentation-heavy development paths of medical software products.
Tech executives will need to learn to play by the rules of rigorous clinical evidence, strict adherence to operating procedures, and highest scrutiny in data protection and compliance.
On the other side, big healthcare’s business and operating model, path to reimbursement, and value proposition to doctors and patients are clearly defined, whereas in digital health they are anything but.
Healthcare leaders need to learn to embrace the exploratory nature and nascent, fluid guardrails of digital health. Even experienced medical device leaders will need to bridge the substantial differences between software and physical devices in both development and commercialisation.
Healthcare leaders need to ready themselves to engage deeply with an area that is so very different from the industry they have dedicated their career to, in terms of technology, but even more importantly in maturity and stability.
Digital Health entrepreneurs understand the space very well, but having often spent most of their career in small-to-mid-sized startups will need to learn how to lead change in a large corporation and to navigate the inherent inertia, politics, and red tape that come with the territory.
Finally, both tech and healthcare C-suites need to open their eyes and minds to the effort, investment, and dedication it takes to develop and commercialise regulated medical software products.
There is still a prevalent assumption that anything digital must come fast, cheap, and easy, which has led companies to underestimate the challenge at hand, resulting in painful learnings and substantial strategic resets. Top executives should not be exempt from the reskilling effort, instead they should lead by example to appreciate what it takes.
Regardless of provenance and seniority, fundamentally re-skilling established leaders requires a tremendous amount of self-awareness and humility, as well as curiosity, patience, and personal ambition on their part.
Most critically, successful leaders must accept that it is not enough for themselves or their team to see the light, but that it is an integral part of their role to bring their partners and collaborators along.
Digital healthcare, and transformation as a whole, cannot be achieved in isolation; it needs to be tightly weaved into the core business, at every level tapping into its expertise, relationships, and infrastructure. Companies need to succeed at upskilling their entire workforce, those who specialize in it, but most of all those who don’t —yet.
Successful digital transformation in any sector certainly requires some substance-matter expertise, but its leadership should first and foremost be made up of the most gifted coaches, teachers, and integrators, strong systems thinkerswho lead with curiosity and humility, not in order to bridge established and new business, but to make them amalgamate into a new whole. Together they shall create new departments, operating models, and eventually, a thriving digital enterprise.
