7 Comments

Nice work Christina and team for this insightful piece on the path forward for services! Excellent breakdown on the various areas and of course the pending challenges to come.

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As a technologist who has built SaaS and microservices platforms for over two decades, allow me to point out a glaring current problem with the services approach. When it comes to implementing APIs and services for startups, the Wild West is tolerable when you're sharing cat photos. It's terribly problematic when it comes to healthcare and its compliances.

I recently encountered this when opting in to a tele-health-enabled API service integration with a program under Abbott. The registration form lacked the expected quality checks and user feedback that you'd expect from even cat photo uploading, let alone a financial services site, throwing errors without feedback or reason.

Inspecting the web presences at the various root domains involved with the URLs involved with this customer journey, I found a confusing mess of health startups that promoted the usual cures for insomnia, erectile dysfunction, anxiety, depression, smoking cessation, premature ejaculation, and hair loss -- basically the holy order of profiteering medicinal scams -- and not a single word for the condition that made me enter the process.

The short of it is that the technical standards are poor in these API exchanges between "move fast and break things" health startups playing with services. Worse, given the information requested, HIPAA compliance, and the peripheral legal-but-scammy medical fields associated with most immediate startup profitability, it made them look like a front for an unscrupulous phishing scam or data harvesting operation.

The standards need to be much higher, even for legitimate actors. Because, like crypto, the standard is currently set to enable rampant abuse, deception, data theft, and phishing scams that will harm the legitimate adoption across the entire industry.

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I feel so seen at this moment! Anyone that knows Healthcare knows that technology alone cannot solve the major challenges.

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This healthcare read is a must-read! It offers a thoughtful insight into why healthcare services will still be needed in the foreseeable future. Let's give a big thank you to those who make it possible! #Healthcare #Services #ForeseeableFuture

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Fantastic read and thoughtful insight. Healthcare will still need the services component for the foreseeable future. Thanks.

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This was an excellent read! Nice work Chrissy and team. It very much aligns with our experience at Scene Health moving from a SAAS model to a tech enabled services model as we expanded into health plans.

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Thanks for sharing, great write up about tech-enabled services. We are one as well at oatmealhealth.com, a virtual nodule clinic that preventatively screens underserved Americans for cancer.

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