Over the past year, our team at Stratizant has collaborated with a healthcare services and software company that manages licensing, clinician credentialing, and payor enrolment - to replatform their product for enhanced customer experience and to facilitate scale and flexibility moving into the future.
Their company focuses on four key parts of healthcare: cost savings, provider experience, access to care, and quality of care. Effective communication with customers, state licensing organizations, medical practitioners, and among the internal team are all fundamental for succeeding in helping clinicians and organizations improve the quality and access to care by reducing the burden of managing licensing, credentialing, and enrollment.
The process of helping to achieve their goals has illuminated some common challenges companies face when transitioning from an ideation stage to the building of a scalable product.
A critical hurdle that emerged through our work with the company, like many of our clients, is the translation of knowledge between teams. We often find that the different perspectives, needs, and goals of teams can be disconnected and even in conflict, leading to silos. In this case, the challenge came in the form of misalignment between their business needs and tech capabilities.
We’ve seen this problem before. The design team will come up with great ideas from a business perspective, then pass them off to the tech team for building, at which point the tech team realizes those asks, although creative, are not feasible because of budgetary or technological reasons. Inevitably, the design team has to go back to the drawing board, delaying the process.
As an in-house, out-of-house tech team, we addressed this challenge by building communication into the workflow and joining the design meetings earlier in the process to bring the different perspectives and limitations into planning, thereby dismantling the team silos.
One of the ways we recommend building checkpoints for communication into digital workflows is to develop a holistic value-chain by pushing features through prescribed environments, each of which creates a space to see what’s working both from a design and a technical perspective, and creates the opportunity to push features back to a development environment if issues arise. This process allowed us to collaborate on successfully building a new custom ordering system in the platform to optimize the management of tickets, helping the company deliver exceptional customer service. Quality assurance checkpoints facilitate our ability to iterate often, catch problems early, and communicate with each team to ensure products are developed effectively, efficiently, and with the goals of the business in mind.
Good communication is the bridge between uncertainty and clarity. It’s the effective and reliable translation of knowledge that happens between the functional areas of an organization. Communicating well requires transparency, ensures timely responses and manifests as a high functioning iterative process between parties. Effectively recording, storing, analysing, and transmitting verified data are key components to a successful communication strategy for tech-based businesses.¹
Addressing Gaps to meet Customer Needs
Making a plan and having confidence in our people and our ability to learn allows us to make sure our clients' needs are being met. Throughout our replatforming work, we maintained communication as an integral part of our service to ensure satisfaction and address any gaps in their platform design.
From the initial consulting sessions with the founder and CEO of the company to providing proof of concepts, walking through different screens and capturing and translating tickets from the previous platform into the new one, we made sure all parties involved knew what was happening during replatforming.
Our team understood the value in maintaining attentive dialogue with the company so even while experiencing the challenges experienced in the iterative process of revising a digital ecosystem, they were aware, involved, and on board with the changes.
Facilitating open dialogue in communications with clients and showing them the incremental changes being made allows them to feel confident in our ability to support their business needs while streamlining the digital transformation by creating opportunities to discuss, assess, and adapt at each stage of the value-chain. Successful knowledge translation between siloed teams relies on effective, structured communication. By bringing teams together at the design phase and following a roadmap for product development with pre-prescribed checkpoints for quality assurance, companies can effectively transform their digital ecosystems to support the goals of the organization.
References
Farace, Salvatore, et Fernanda Mazzotta. « The effect of human capital and networks on knowledge and innovation in SMEs », Journal of Innovation Economics & Management, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, pp. 39-71.