Why Reveal HealthTech Is The Ideal Partner For Your Healthcare Technology Needs
- Published: August 2, 2023
- Author: Andrew Bravo
Where we started
It’s no secret that healthcare is filled with challenging problems. The status quo just isn’t good enough for patients, providers, or anyone else who interacts with the healthcare system.
The upside to this situation is that there’s no shortage of improvements to be made. It’s a great time to be building in healthcare, with dozens of innovative organizations filled with talented, driven, and caring teams working hard to provide patients with the care that they deserve.
Leveraging technology is an important way to enable these organizations to solve the most pressing problems in healthcare. However, as my colleague Sanchit has outlined, it’s hard to find the right partners that can assist with the development of this technology.
Unfortunately, this is another area where the status quo just isn’t good enough. If you’ve been building in healthcare, you’ve likely received dozens of unprompted and generic inbound messages with offers to build your product. What’s usually missing from these messages are a true understanding of the healthcare ecosystem, your company’s precise context, and the unique problems that you’re trying to solve.
There are no shortcuts to creating a truly impactful product in healthcare. The industry is too nuanced and complex to cut corners. Unfortunately, the approach that sounds the cheapest will often end up as the most expensive, protracted, and wasteful path.
At Reveal HealthTech, we do things differently. We saw that the holistic, highly specialized engineering support that healthcare builders deserve didn’t exist in the market. So we decided to create it ourselves.
How are we different
We were born out of the firsthand recognition that creating impactful healthcare technology requires more than just the engineering perspective. As we worked alongside the portfolio companies of W Health Ventures, we saw that skilled engineering is an important part of creating a meaningful healthcare product, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle.
Focusing too narrowly on the technical aspects of a problem prevents organizations from fully appreciating clinical and strategic realities. Without incorporating feedback and expertise from multiple perspectives, organizations can end up with an expensive, ineffective piece of technology that prevents them from reaching their full potential.
Put simply, technology itself is part of the solution. But it’s not the whole solution.
Our three pillars of technology development
At Reveal HealthTech, we specialize in three critical pillars of technology development:
- Healthcare-specific engineering excellence
- Unmatched clinical expertise
- Strategic & operational insights
Each of these pillars is important on its own, but must act in combination with the other two factors to enable the most successful outcome.
1. Healthcare-specific engineering excellence
At Reveal HealthTech, we focus specifically on healthcare projects. While our team draws on best practices from technology & product development in other industries, we have built a healthcare-focused team with a true understanding of the nuances within this complex ecosystem.
Our experience in building healthcare products spans a wide variety of use cases. At Elevate Now, we worked alongside the founding team to bring the company from an idea to a fully functioning product that delivered care to patients. When working with W Health Ventures’ incubation studio, we collaborated with their team to understand the pain points that healthcare founders frequently face when launching their products and created a common digital health platform that standardized core elements of the health stack and allowed for sufficient customization for specific use cases.
Throughout both projects, there were critical decisions that would impact the future use and scalability of the technology. Tradeoffs around system architecture and roadmap prioritization are important parts of product development that require clear communication and engagement with company leadership.
Without applying a clinical and strategic lens to product development, it’s easy to fall into the trap of building technology that functions at a base level but ultimately doesn’t align with clinical workflows or reinforce the company’s overall goals. By drawing on our experience, we can effectively collaborate with leadership teams to ensure that the technology that’s developed is purpose-built to achieve the organization’s most important objectives.
2. Unmatched clinical expertise
Reveal HealthTech is unique among healthcare engineering partners in having a dedicated Chief Medical & Innovation Officer to guide our product development efforts. The clinical perspective is vital and often underutilized when creating healthcare products. At the end of the day, the technology decisions made during product development will have a direct impact on patients, as well as the providers who are caring for them. Solutions that are functional from a technical perspective, but interfere with the ability for clinicians to effectively deliver care, often impose significant costs and inefficiencies on the entire organization.
The clinical perspective is certainly important to ensure that ethical and regulatory considerations remain top of mind during product development. In addition, a consistent collaboration between the team that’s building the product and the clinical team that will ultimately be using the product often leads to impressive results.
For example, tech-enabled healthcare companies like Iora, PillPack, and Firsthand each target different healthcare needs and patient populations. Although each company achieved success due to a variety of factors, one common thread is that all three organizations prioritized a tight feedback loop between the patient-facing teams and the individuals who were building the product.
We’ve taken inspiration from these companies and ensured that our product development process engages clinicians and patients as key subject matter experts and end-users to continuously evolve the product and effectively address the most relevant use cases. In a few weeks, Salim will provide a deeper overview on our approach and explain why applying clinical expertise is essential to effective product development.
3. Strategic & operational insights
By applying a strategic & operational perspective to technology development, companies can ensure that their products will support their top organizational priorities. Fostering a close alignment between technology development and companywide goals is critical to ensuring an optimal allocation of fixed engineering bandwidth. Put simply, before deciding which product or technology to build, it’s important to first understand why you’re building it, how you’ll ultimately create it, and where it fits within your top priorities.
For example, our digital advisory offering helps healthcare organizations determine their point of departure for product development and identify top priorities for the future. The combination of clearly articulating a company’s digital capabilities and comparing these to the features that will be required most urgently in patient-facing services is vital to managing your engineering pipeline. The resulting roadmap will help to guide the organization’s overall strategy, both within product teams and throughout other parts of the company.
Similarly, a clear articulation of product requirements and subsequent systems architecture decisions can enable a company to achieve its financial and operational goals. By applying systems thinking, we help companies examine technical complexity, recognize patterns, and create effective, lean solutions that focus on optimizing expenses and generating savings. One example of this work is applying a detailed review of how to optimally leverage cloud-based services while balancing the tradeoffs between using real-time storage vs. lower cost options like Amazon S3 Glacier. Additionally, companies can review their products that use cloud-based compute power and decide which portions of their services can run on an as-needed basis, rather than running at all times.
In all of these instances, thoughtful product and technology strategy ensures that companies are able to meet their broader strategic, operational, and financial goals.
Concluding thoughts
Technology has the potential to address some of the most challenging problems in healthcare and improve our ability to serve all stakeholders, especially patients and providers. However, developing these tech-enabled solutions requires the clinical and strategic perspectives in addition to specialized engineering support to deliver results at scale. These three perspectives can come from a variety of sources, whether inside the company or from external partners, but it’s crucial that each of the three is given thoughtful consideration in every project.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Reveal HealthTech can help your organization, reach out at