The Future of Digital Healthcare with Head of Software, Luis
Learn more about Luis's forecast for the future of digital healthcare, creating patient-centric software and the processes involved in his role at Medbelle
Could you explain the complexity and limitation of the technology used within healthcare currently?
Generally speaking, when it comes to software product development within the healthcare industry, you will find, in most cases, closed-down monolithic systems built with legacy technologies, and most noticeably, they’re not tailored for patients, clinicians and administrative staff to have a great end-to-end user experience. This, of course, is also a major opportunity to build new solutions that use top-of-the-line technology and to customise the system centring it around the user and, most importantly, the patient.
What is monolithic software?
A monolithic architecture is a single, unified model for the design of a software program. Monolithic, here means to be "composed all in one piece".
How do you and your team enable Medbelle to change the limitations?
Medbelle’s Software Engineering team, hand-in-hand with the Product Management team, actively identifies problems, researches the current state of the industry and defines solutions that have our patients and clinicians as our main focus. We use the latest but most stable technologies to quickly iterate over these solutions and ongoingly deliver value to our stakeholders.
Having a great technology stack makes the experience of building these products a lot of fun and interesting. This also allows us to excite others to join us and grow the team to have the capacity to take on bigger challenges. On top of this, it’s key for us to surround ourselves with people who care about the goals of the company and like to collaborate with all our peers.
How can technology shape the future of healthcare and provide improved patient experiences?
Having a fantastic technology stack, tooling and infrastructure allows us to build performant, user-friendly products that aim to support the patient’s journey end to end. Enabling transparency, communication and access to information at the right time.
What is a tech stack?
A tech stack is the collection of tools, platforms, apps, and pieces of software used to build products, carry out business operations, and monitor performance metrics. This can also include coding languages. Each company will often have a different stack from each other that builds and evolves over time.
How has Medbelle developed and grown technologically since you’ve been here?
Medbelle’s goal is big and certainly challenging. From the earliest stage of the company, we’ve dedicated ourselves to increasing our understanding of the healthcare industry and the challenges faced by patients, clinicians and administrative staff; we’ve ongoingly taken these learnings to adapt our data structures, tooling, and infrastructure to be more efficient and effective.
We are careful when making changes to our stack, and to do this, we experiment a lot with emerging technologies that can improve the overall development process, performance, security and reliability of our systems.
What are your biggest challenges, and how do you overcome them?
This is true for most startups with a big goal in mind. For us, our biggest challenge has been navigating through a complex health care system with several types of stakeholders and many redundant processes. We decided to map out these end-to-end processes as a starting point to be able to break them apart into manageable sizes and work on automating them, removing unnecessary overhead and ultimately optimising them.
The biggest misconception about technology and digitalisation?
Within the tech industry, and most specifically for software products developed for the healthcare landscape, it is easily forgotten that technology and digitalisation alone cannot solve all of the important problems. It is key to understand that the human factor plays a fundamental role and that technology is here as a tool to ensure the best outcome for our patients. Having a shiny piece of technology is certainly tempting, but it does not create value unless it fundamentally make people’s lives better while they are dealing with a medical concern.
Any advice for someone wishing to pursue a career in tech?
From an academic standpoint, you can pursue a degree in Computer science. There are great programs out there.
If you are a self-learner, there are, fortunately, now more than ever, many resources paid and free available to get started.
Find yourself a mentor, someone already with some experience to guide you. Mentors are quite helpful when trying to navigate a very large technology landscape.
