Amit Phull, MD: Healthcare Tech Innovation Demands Physician Input

"It's not that physicians aren't eager to innovate," said Amit Phull, MD. It's that often the technologies put before them did not take into account the nature of the work they do.

As both a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital physician and the chief medical officer of the tech company Doximity, Phull is acutely aware of the challenges inherent to creating technology for medical professionals. At the Digital Pharma East meeting in Philadelphia, he sat down with Healthcare Analytics News™ to pick apart those roadblocks to adoption.

A problem with the lack of physician input in design is that the end products can make physicians less efficient rather than moreso. He cautioned against taking consumer technologies into the healthcare space without thinking them through.

"We have to take into consideration all of the inadvertent effects of something like that," he said, pointing to an example of Amazon Alexa's voice recognition capabilities causing chaos when they pick up television chatter.

"We have to remember that it's a very, very different space in which technology has to behave somewhat differently than it does in other," Phull said.