In the latest episode of Impetus Digital‘s Fireside Chat, I sat down with Christine Jacob, Founder and Managing Director of Digi-Bridges. We talked about the future of mobile and digital health, including exciting technologies such as VR and AR. We also touched on a wide variety of subjects such as the importance of user engagement strategies when it comes to mobile health and other digital technologies, the potential barriers to mobile health technology, and the use of data gathered from these technologies. Finally, we also discussed what technologies Christine is most looking forward to seeing enter the healthcare industry and ways to make digital health more “patient-centric.”
Here is a short snippet of our discussion:
Q: Tell us a little bit about what you have discovered about the best engagement processes, protocols, or other types of materials or products over the last few years?
A: One of my key eye-openers was when I discovered that adoption is a multifactorial process that goes far beyond technology. In most cases, when we do user research and user engagement, we’re too focused on the features and on the tool attempt. So making sure that, in my projects, we cover all those contextual elements was one of the key learnings that I had. Understanding that technological tools in healthcare are different than other technological tools that address a specific single user need. Because you have people with comorbidities, they are treated by a multidisciplinary team, and if you’re only looking at one single tool, you’re overlooking so many things that could bring tremendous value to this tool and make it a game-changer, as opposed to just this little tool. Making sure that the users are embedded in all the life cycle phases from the beginning, from the ideation until the delivery, not just testers at the end, with something that we’ve already created is super important…
Q: Do you have any words of wisdom on how technologies aimed at improving patient-centricity can be implied earlier in the process, for example in clinical trial development?
A: There are definitely initiatives, very successful ones, even from a clinical trial level. That’s super important for the sustainability of those tools, because at that stage, you can really build scientific evidence of the effectiveness of such tools. Because in the environment of a clinical trial, you can really measure all the health benefits of such tools. It’s not just user research where you are measuring things like efficiency or ease of use, or usefulness. You’re actually looking into real healthcare outcomes that are coming out of such a Digital Tool. I’ve seen a few brilliant examples that are going in that direction…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Christine Jacob, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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About Impetus Digital
Impetus Digital is the spark behind sustained healthcare stakeholder communication, collaboration, education, and insight synthesis. Our best-in-class technology and professional services ensure that life science organizations around the world can easily and cost-effectively grow and prosper—from brand or idea discovery to development, commercialization, execution, and beyond—in collaboration with colleagues, customers, healthcare providers, payers, and patients.