The role of the chief technology officer at health IT vendors and healthcare provider organizations has evolved over time from managing technology teams to helping drive business strategies and foster innovation across an organization.

In today’s healthcare landscape, a CTO must be fully engaged, playing an active role in every aspect of their team, said Dave Ross, CTO of Teladoc Health, a telemedicine technology and services company.

Having founded technology companies in the past, Ross recently stepped into the role of CTO of the large virtual care provider. His work has had a life-saving impact. A product he developed in a past position monitored a COVID-19 patient’s condition and alerted providers when the patient’s vitals deteriorated, enabling timely intervention in the ER.

Without that intervention, the patient would not have survived. The experience fueled Ross’s passion for transforming patient care through innovation.

Ross believes that today’s CTOs at health IT vendors and healthcare provider organizations should drive innovation on the front lines, that being close to the builders and end users helps improve processes and surface ideas that would never emerge from a boardroom.

Moreover, he thinks CTOs and their vendors should work together very closely, that the best outcomes come when product-minded technologists and tech-minded "productists" share outcomes. Further, he says CTOs must know when not to build.

Innovation from the front lines

"Years ago, someone told me I’m a developer’s CTO," Ross recalled. "He meant it in a negative way at the time, but it’s something I now take pride in. I still write code, and I love doing a deep dive and figuring out a solution in the trenches with team members.

"It’s all about context and perspective," he continued. "I don’t think any industry is changing more than software development in the era of generative AI. In order to be successful in an AI development environment, you have to be close to the work in order to make correct decisions and uncover true business opportunities."

Front lines also include where users and clients live, Ross added, and he is a strong believer in tech teams embedding themselves into anything that gives them as much business context as possible.

"This means webinars, implementation meetings and even customer support," he explained. "This also is relevant in the context of AI-driven software development, because now more than ever, we can continually reinvent our products and redefine the value we can provide.

"The best product companies are continually reinventing themselves," he added. "My philosophy is to find product market fit and then continue to fight for it. You have to have flexibility in your product and the ability to adapt or reinvent while maintaining a stable core foundation. If you can find the intersection of that scaled repeatability and continual reinvention, that’s the sweet spot in my mind."

Technologists and ‘productists’ sharing outcomes

Tech-minded "productists" ensure an organization is solving real healthcare problems, grounding innovation in things like patient access and clinical workflows, Ross said. At the same time, product-minded technologists translate those needs into scalable, secure and interoperable systems that clinicians can trust and easily access, he added.

"When we align these perspectives around shared outcomes, we can deliver business value through highly tech-enabled and tech-forward products and services," he explained. "It’s what drew me to Teladoc Health. We have an advantage because we are supplying the technology and the service together.

"The company delivers and orchestrates high-quality care at scale by combining technology and clinical expertise to make any moment of care more impactful," he continued. "The partnership between technology and product is what enables us to accelerate that – not just in the number of lives we impact, but the scale of the impact we are making. We have the scale to make healthcare better and create real-world impact for our customers and the healthcare industry."

To build or not to build

In an industry flooded by AI hype, a modern CTO must know when not to build new technology, prioritizing systems that maximize impact without duplicating existing capabilities, Ross said.

"We have to ask, ‘Is what we’re building differentiated? Is it delivering compounding business value? And if not, is it something that we can just use and adopt?’" he continued.

"Anytime a CTO wants to introduce a new technology into a business problem, and do it in a way that actually creates compounding value, they should understand the boundaries of where that technology starts and ends," he explained. "They need to understand three things really well: the humans that use the service, the technology that interacts with those human users and the data that it generates."

Teladoc Health has a unique environment for building because the human components of the business are its own care team employees.

"And in virtual care, there’s always an evolving technology opportunity – that’s the perfect Petri dish for machine learning and AI," he noted. "Because when the AI gets something wrong, the humans training and improving it for the next time are employees.

"We have the data, the workflows and the humans delivering the service under one roof," he concluded. "Understanding and accessing these people and processes is a huge opportunity and advantage over trying to train AI with your clients’ users."

*Follow Bill’s health IT coverage on LinkedIn: *Bill Siwicki *Email him: *[email protected] Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

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