How to build stronger connections between clinicians & tech teams

We had a conversation with Eddie Kay (Director of Engineering, Devoted Health), Kyle Munkittrick (Group PM, One Medical) and Eva Luo (Director of Clinical Innovation, Cityblock) to discuss how you can build stronger connections between clinicians & tech teams, here is what we learned:

• The biggest barrier to better collaboration is underestimating how complicated the other person's job is. That's why your clinicians need to shadow engineers and why your engineers need to shadow clinicians.
• Find the least risk averse clinicians in your org and use them as spearheads to alpha test solutions, then evangelize these solutions to their peers. At One Medical, 5% of the clinician workforce are ambassadors and they spend +- 1h / month doing this.
• Both clinicians and engineers tend to think they are the smartest people in the room. To mitigate this you need: a) Build a flat company culture where everyone can give and receive feedback and b) Drop the habit of addressing doctors with "Dr." or the alphabet soup they regularly have behind their last name. It's not Dr. Luo, it's just Eva for you.
• Whatever product or engineering decision you make, always emphasize the why. WHY are we prioritizing this specific thing and not something else?
• Make big product trade-offs together with your clinicians. Bring them together in a room and say "alright, here are three things we need to build and it's going to take 3 months each. What should we focus on first?".

I asked ChatGPT to squeeze out all the juicy bits from the panel but all I got was an error message that said: "Dude, the whole 60 minutes is a treasure trove! You want me to compress gold into a tinny nugget? Not happening!" so if you missed it or want to pass it along to your colleagues, here's the full recording and here is an overview of the key insights.

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Quick intro: we’re Thomas and Rik, building Awell - a low-code platform allowing care teams to design, implement and optimize care flows in days, not months. CareOps grew out of our years spent improving CareOps at innovative providers.