Do one thing, and do it well
The first thing to take into account is focus. A system built to enhance diabetes treatment should really concentrate just on diabetes treatment. No generic healthcare solution will ever be as effective and useful as a system specifically tailored for diabetes treatment and designed with the needs of people with diabetes and their healthcare professionals in mind.Being able to concentrate on diabetes treatment means that someone else should take care of things that are generic to all of the services, such as data storage and sharing, sign-on mechanisms, authentications, and so on. And that someone else should concentrate on that task, implementing such a generic platform as well as possible, for all those services to use.
You're not alone
There will be several services
for managing diabetes data. No service will be perfect for all people with
diabetes. People have different challenges with their condition, and they should
be able to select the tools that best fit their individual needs. There also
needs to be competition between services. That drives development and pushes
each of the services to become the best they can be. It should also be possible
to move from one solution to another, as your life changes.
We should also remember that
it's never just about diabetes. All people with diabetes are individuals, and
the properties that describe their diabetes are never adequate to portray a
holistic picture of their life. They have other illnesses and conditions, and
that information needs to be taken into account when making adjustments to their
treatment. I really don't think offering a complete end-to-end system for just
diabetes data management works.
Besides, why would one want to implement all that generic functionality like data storage all over for each service? And even more importantly, why would a doctor need to sign on to several applications when meeting a customer? Healthcare organizations are very well aware of these issues nowadays.
Besides, why would one want to implement all that generic functionality like data storage all over for each service? And even more importantly, why would a doctor need to sign on to several applications when meeting a customer? Healthcare organizations are very well aware of these issues nowadays.
There really is a genuine need
for those platforms that store and manage all that data for all those services.
And all the services really need to be integrated and talk to each
other.
You're either a platform or a service
In my view, one should really make a
choice. Either you're implementing a platform with open interfaces really well,
or you're providing well designed services on top of such a platform. It's
really difficult to be making both, while still keeping the interfaces open for
all possible services, in a way that's fair and accessible for
everyone.
There are many companies out
there working really hard to make life easier for people with diabetes. I hope
none of them think they're able to be the only solution making that possible,
and really encourage them all to evaluate first whether they're offering a
platform or a service. In the case of a platform, they should ask how they can
best allow all third party services to operate on them, and not just limiting to
diabetes services. A big question is also whether they are really simplifying
the current mix of existing platforms or just adding to the complexity. In the
case of offering a service, the companies should see how they can really add
value to the whole ecosystem.
No comments:
Post a Comment