A former Apple leader told CNBC Silicon Valley tech companies' current user and product experience strategies won't work in the healthcare market.
Robin Goldstein spent 22 years at Apple, where she served in a number of leadership roles across the company, including senior engineering manager and, most recently, senior manager of health special projects.
Ms. Goldstein told CNBC tech companies looking to move into the healthcare space cannot view bad products or poor user experiences as isolated incidents. Each negative association has ramifications beyond that particular product or experience; companies cannot just "wipe the slate clean and start again," she said.
Ms. Goldstein outlined three ways health tech differs from a traditional product or service offered by a tech company:
1. Health tech products directly connect users to their own mortality. Current digital healthcare products are designed to help patients stay healthy or to help them identify, screen or manage illnesses, Ms. Goldstein states, making their connection to the technology or device that much more intimate.
2. Health products must be accepted by users and their providers. Ms. Goldstein noted that to have a meaningful effect on an individual's health, health tech must adequately close the loop between users and their clinicians. Products fail when they are either accepted by the patient but not incorporated by their provider, or providers recommend a device, but patients do not use it as prescribed, she said.
3. Health tech must be useful/optimal on the first try. When adopting new technologies, the marketplace performs a cost-benefit analysis of the new product to assess its usefulness or risk. Products must prove their worth upon initial introduction, Ms. Goldstein said. For example, every new microfluidic testing venture will be subjected to increased scrutiny and suspicion after the Theranos scandal, which ultimately forced the startup to close for good earlier this month. Those companies must prove their products' worth and overcome scrutiny right out of the gate to avoid suffering a similar fate as the blood-testing company.
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