We don’t have a shortage of scientific innovation, but we do have many big hurdles between it and adoption at scale.
We don’t lack scientific innovation, but we do face major hurdles between it and adoption at scale.
As humans, we are inherently sceptical of change and anything new, despite our penchant for novelty.
Healthcare takes that a step further. For good reason, we spend years teaching potential medics to look analytically at everything they see. For decades, most healthcare professionals are trained to assess every line they read or piece of information they are told with a healthy degree of uncertainty.
That is what makes them good at their job. It also makes introducing new ideas, technologies and ways of working more challenging.
Combine this with the inertia often present in large organisations, which are frequently the buyers of these new technologies, and we have a perfect storm. The icing on the cake is the heavy workload many healthcare professionals are currently experiencing; so now no one is eating the metaphorical cake.
Innovators, whether they are developing new technologies, new approaches or novel therapies, need to address the elephant in the room: trust.
So, what makes people trust a new technology?
The clinical evidence.
The evidence needs to demonstrate the claims being made about the technology, including its clinical performance, reproducibility and relevance to the patients it will actually be used with.
The communications challenge is distilling the science without losing the rigour, limitations, or factual context that went into the studies, while making the findings accessible to a clinician who may have only a few minutes to understand why they matter.
The regulatory clearance.
Regulatory compliance, alongside any other frameworks relevant to the technology, can require years of work and significant resources. Clearance demonstrates that a product has met the regulatory requirements needed for its intended use. For procurement, governance and clinical teams, it is often a prerequisite for serious consideration and the point at which wider adoption conversations can begin.
Communications here should make the status clear: what has been approved or cleared, for which use, in which market and what that means in practice.
The real-world impact.
Evidence and regulatory status are just the beginning. Innovators also need to understand how it fits into existing pathways, what changes for users, the health economics, how it interacts with existing systems, the security implications, and what happens if something goes wrong.
Real-world case studies and pilots are vital for learning all this and communicating effectively with potential new customers.
The company behind it.
Ultimately, people look beyond a product's technical performance when they make a conscious or subconscious decision about whether to trust it. They are also forming a view of the people who developed it and the organisation asking them to change the way they work.
The credibility of the team matters. So does how openly the company communicates externally, whether that is its clinical evidence, its regulatory claims, interactions with clinicians and customers, and whether what it says remains consistent over time.
Consistency, restraint and clarity reinforce the credibility being built elsewhere.
Trust is cumulative.
It is shaped by the studies, the regulatory work, the experience of using the technology and every interaction someone has with the company behind it.