Amazon, Google, Uber and other companies outside the healthcare space will fail to develop lasting solutions for the industry if they don't take provider and patient experiences into consideration, according to Forbes contributor Sachin H. Jain.
Four takeaways from Mr. Jain:
1. EMR implementation is a prime example of why it's critical to understand the patient and provider perspectives, according to Mr. Jain. Implementation has been tumultuous and slow-going because software engineers haven't had that clinical awareness.
2. Mr. Jain cites Boston-based Harvard Medical School as an example of an educational model for non-healthcare leaders. To help business and science leaders learn what care delivery entails, Harvard Medical School launched an executive education program. Executives participate in classroom discussions and field trips to research labs, underserved communities and clinics where they can shadow physicians.
3. Harvard's executive education program helped a team of software engineers at Google improve how the search engine handles healthcare-related searches. The team shadowed physicians for four hours a day, which helped them develop search results that reflect the perspectives physicians would offer patients.
4. Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University and Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University offer programs similar to Harvard's. Anthem subsidiary CareMore Health System in Cerritos, Calif., also exposes non-healthcare executives to clinical settings so they can develop a deeper understanding of the industry.
"'You can't change something unless you know something,'" Mr. Jain wrote, quoting his mentor, former CareMore CEO Leeba Lessin. "We have a very complicated healthcare system, and my hope is that tech companies work hard to understand its complexity before they try to change it."