'Respect people and the complexity and difficulty of their lives'

As a designer, respect people and the complexity and difficulty of their lives. The belief that human relationships are the heart of healthcare, and digital should enrich them, not replace them. The search for shared value – no healthcare solution has a singular customer. 

A layered approach to value in digital solutions – from a core mechanism of action that drives health outcomes; through an engagement layer that drives adoption and use at the individual level; to an integration layer that ensures fit within the broader technological, organizational and regulatory context; to a business layer that ensures the solution provider can make money and continue to invest in the solution.

Other industries have been faster to embrace design as a core part of the solution rather than a wrapper or a surface layer. There are a surprising number of digital health initiatives that think scientific and technological expertise is enough, and then are surprised when they hit basic, beginner-level design challenges that thwart solution uptake.

If you are aiming for health outcomes at scale, human-centered design is absolutely essential. Without deeply understanding the people who use the product, the bigger picture of their journeys, and the way individuals and institutions intersect and interact, you won’t find the leverage points for change. I mean understanding people 360 degrees – combining the design lens with psychological, sociological, and biomedical lens too. 

The magic is in design, science, and technology joining forces to help people give and receive better care. To me it’s telling that many of the successful first-generation digital health companies had patient-founders or designer-founders, so they were bringing that approach either intuitively through their lived experience or their professional toolkit.

People talk a lot about go-to-market and business models but often in a very shallow way, and the US market looms too large in those discussions because so much of the investor funding comes from there. Meanwhile, China has orders of magnitude greater scale of uptake compared to the rest of the world, but only gets the occasional mention. 

So I think the geographical lens is underutilized – analyzing different health system structures and the unique opportunities that different systems provide. I’d love to see the community working together to consolidate our understanding of that into some kind of global go-to-market playbook, so we all have a better shot of reaching scale.

I love gardening and I tend to think about product strategy with a gardener's eye – you don’t bulldoze your whole garden and start from scratch, you need to evolve things gradually, there’s a lot of coexistence of the past, present, and future. You can’t fight the environmental conditions, you have to work with them. It takes clear vision and constant attention, combined with an adaptive mindset, good timing, and some luck.