It’s a time when we are all remote-workers. Startups looking for new ways to add value to customers. Large pharmas looking for ways to innovate without breaking the system.
To quote Bill Gates from 25 years ago. Gates was asked how Microsoft can compete in enterprise software when they only had business-unit capabilities. Gates was quoted as saying that large enterprises are a collection of many business units, so he was not worried.
The same is true today – whether you are a business unit in Pfizer or a 5-person healthtech startup
Here are 7 tips for innovation in healthcare
1. One person in the team will be a technical guru, let’s call him/her the CTO. Don’t give the CTO admin access to AWS. He / she should not be fooling around with your instances. Same for sudo access to the Linux machines.
2. Make a no rule – No changes 1 hour before end of day. No changes Thursday/Friday
3. Security – think about security before writing code. Develop a threat model first. I’ve seen too many startups get this wrong. Also big HMOs get it wrong.
4. Standards – standardize on one dev stack – listen to the CTO but do not try new things. If a new requirement comes up, talk about it, be critical, sleep on it. Tip – your CTO’s first inclination will be to write code – this is not always the best strategy – the best is not writing any code at all. You may be tempted to use some third-party tools like Tableaux – be very very careful. The licensing or the lack of multi-tenancy may be a very bad fit for you – so always keep your eye on your budget and business model.
5. Experiment – budget for experimentation by the dev team. Better to plan an experiment and block out time/money for it and fail than get derailed in an unplanned way. This will also keep things interesting for the team and help you know that they are not doing their own midnight projects.
6. Minimize – always be removing features. Less is more.
7. CAPA – (corrective and preventive action) – Debrief everything. Especially failures. Document in a Slack channel and create follow-up actions (easy in slack – just star them).
