Considerations on skills, teams and resources in eHealth

The number of start-ups entering digital health sector is increasing with each passing day. It is important for the startup founders to follow some guidelines and an eHealth strategy before developing a product and launching it in the market. It is important to do an intensive clinical research and select the team which is going to produce the product. Long term productivity should not be compromised over the faster delivery of the modules.

Bringing software to market

Before designing any medical product, developers need to do detailed clinical research to carry out the feasibility analysis. The product development goes through numerous phases before being launched in the market which includes product requirements and specification, technical designing, and finally coding and testing.

This product development life cycle model can also be visualized regarding two disciplines. Former includes Clinical research and product specifications and UX. This part requires strategic planning on the part of developers and has high risk. Latter includes product development phase which offers lower risk and can be outsourced to other third party companies.

Growing your team intelligently

It is important to have a decent number of equally motivated employees in your team. The co-founder is going to own some part of the company in the long run but can steer the start-up in the right direction with his/her expertise and skills. Employees having a particular set of competencies like software development and testing can be included in the team. But, they are expensive to bring on board and offer low flexibility regarding laying off your employees.

Another way to grow your team is to make use of external resources and contract based employees. It includes hiring freelancers for short-term and outsourcing project to some other company. One major drawback of this method of getting the work done is that freelancer could not be relied upon too easily. So, it becomes critical to divide the work into minimal, deliverable modules such that dependency on the contract based employees is not too high.

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How to utilize limited resources effectively?

Start-up founders sometimes put too much pressure on the developers to deliver a set of features fast with a small number of resources. This incurs what experts call ‘Technical Debt.’ More Rapid delivery of the modules can increase the productivity instantaneously, but it hampers the productivity in the long run. The cost of adding new features and modules rise sharply, and software is more prone to bugs and failure.

Picking up the right architecture, development language, software development life cycle model, thorough testing of the modules being developed, extensive documentation are some of the practices which should be adopted to avoid technical debt.

Launching a start-up is a highly risky venture. It is imperative for the founders to utilize their limited resources efficiently to make it big in the digital health sector.

Product development lifecycle phases	Growing your team
Feasibility analysis Requirements gathering and specification Design Coding Testing	Co-founder Freelancers Contractors Outsourcing project to a third party