104 Healthcare + Product

Presenters: Sherman Leung & Emory Griffith
Healthcare organizations consistently land at the top of the list of Boston’s largest employers. Healthtech is a fast-growing sector that presents opportunities for innovative business models and products as well as many unique challenges. 

This session is meant for product-oriented entrepreneurs and product managers who want to learn more about the intersection of healthcare and product - the unique challenges of building products in healthcare, and strategies for success. We will present our points of view as healthtech PMs and facilitate a discussion to swap insights and learnings from across Boston and different industries to help support the growth and development of products in a space that desperately needs them.

Sherman is currently on the product team at PatientPing, and has built and shipped digital health products at Mango Health, Muvr Labs (a YC/StartX med grad), and as a student-entrepreneur-in-residence at Greylock Partners. He writes regularly about healthcare + product at http://medium.com/@skleung

Emory Griffith was an early member of the Product team at Cure Forward, a healthcare software company that connects patients to clinical trials based on their medical information and genomic sequencing data. He helped define product stategy, as Cure Foreward took the platform to market, building applications for patients, caregivers, Pharma sponsors, clinical trial sites, and healthcare providers.

1. Healthcare +
Product
Strategies, challenges, and
trends from building product in
healthcare

2. Hello!
Sherman
Product @PatientPing
LinkedIn
Emory Griffith
Product @Cure Forward
LinkedIn

3. Outline
Challenges
Learnings
Discussion

4. Pulse Check
●Currently work on healthcare product teams?
●Work in healthcare?
●Work in product, but not in healthcare?
●Entrepreneurs?
●Generally interested?

5. 1.
User
≠
Customer

6. ‘’
The customer who’s
paying for the product is
often not the end-user.
Yet, healthcare products
often need to address
both the needs of the
customer and the user
to be viable

7. Divide, and connect
▣Isolate conversations with users and customers
□Healthcare has clinical vs. administrative
perspectives
▣Map and bridge pain points as appropriate
▣Connect learnings and align expectations
□Get stakeholders in the same room, if appropriate!

8. 2.
Who Is My
User?

9. ‘’

●Most products need to
serve many actors (& types
of users)
●Complicated subject
matter
●Limited user access for
testing/validation

10. Specifics

▣Design with “80/20” rule in mind. Focus on real
use-cases.
▣Use helping hands and plain english where
appropriate
▣Proxy where you can, but eventually you need
to validate with real users

11. 3.
Cross-functional
vs.
Specialization

12. ‘’
PMs : Healthtech
as
Primary Care Providers :
Healthcare

13. Cross-functional expert

14. How to be a “Primary Care Physician”
▣Context-awareness
□Customers
□Internal conversations
▣Quarterbacking work streams when necessary

15. 4.
Workflows:
Supporting >
Changing

16. ‘’
Healthcare is
human

17. How to Support Workflows
▣Use their language
▣“We help you do the hard work”
▣“Integrating + supporting” > “Creating +
changing”

18. 5.
Health Data

19. ‘’

●Data security, privacy
●Data sources
○Lack of trust in data
quality
○Incompleteness in
medical information

20. Health Data
▣Start early with HIPAA & data challenges
□Time & resources required
▣Assuring people why you need data and what
you’ll do with it
▣Earn trust in your data

21. #
Round-table
Discussion

22. Some food for thought
Healthcare
“insiders”
How have you
navigated
healthcare
ecosystems
successfully to
deliver value for
your organization?
Healthcare
Entrepreneurs
Successful
strategies to find
product-market
fit that bridges
the user and
customer pain
points?
PMs in other
industries
Given what you’ve
heard today, what
are some
generalized
learnings from
your industry that
might be
relevant?

23. More Reading
▣Why Product in Healthcare
▣Product Management for the Enterprise
□Relevant for B2B2C Healthtech Businesses

24. Thanks!
More Questions?
@sk_leung
@emory_griffith