MedTechs need a platform that enables their developers’ talents to blossom

Mike Fuller, regional director of marketing, InterSystems UKI, outlines research suggesting developers could instead be better spending their time working on driving their end products to market, rather than getting caught up in menial data tasks.

Genuine talent in medtech software development is almost always in short supply. Despite the current difficulties facing European economies, competition for development experience and skills remains intense.

The right talent makes a huge difference to a company, especially in its early days when it is still developing its solution or seeking to expand and scale. With skilled developers hard to find, retaining their talents by enhancing their daily experience has become a priority.

The point was well made by global management consultants McKinsey: “CIOs should make the developer experience central to their organisation’s talent strategy.” McKinsey stressed that instead of primarily focusing their energies on recruiting the brightest and best, organisations must create a workplace where people with tech skills want to work and stay.

Medtech developers want to spend their time creating new solutions or capabilities and their organisations should enable them to do that. Organisations also need to challenge developers to overcome significant barriers to rapid adoption and scaling, such as ease of use and interoperability with other devices and systems. This is critical, value-generating work that is rewarding in every sense.

Research shows the time developers spend on drudgery

Recent research, conducted by InterSystems in the UK and Ireland, reveals that the situation is quite the opposite among many medtech companies. The research found that at more than half (52%) of such companies, employees with data science skills spend between a quarter and half their time on the basics of organising and cleaning data. More than a quarter (26%) devote even more of their energies to this kind of data drudgery – between half and three-quarters of their time. It is work that can demotivate developers and eats into the time that they could use far more effectively. Given these findings, it is not surprising that more than a quarter (28%) of the leaders at the medtech companies surveyed said one of the biggest overall challenges with data is having the time to organise and clean it.

The end result? The human cost is that developers and data scientists feel they are not moving forward personally. At the same time, the companies they work for fail to grow their customer base and scale their innovations.

Medtech interoperability

In the same research, 74% of companies said they face challenges with interoperability. More than a third of companies, 35%, reported that insufficient in-house skills are their biggest problem in this regard. Not far off half (47%) said they struggle to keep up with the changes in healthcare providers’ interoperability requirements.

Of course, interoperability is critical in healthcare because devices and new solutions simply cannot operate in isolation and expect to gain adoption. They usually ship with companion applications for management and data-preparation, so interoperability with existing systems is essential. Connecting systems can be a complex and rigorous process owing to the required compliance with the standards used by the major healthcare providers and regulators.

In the NHS England, for example, solutions must comply with the mandatory interoperability standards and processes that use draft versions of HL7, emerging HL7 FHIR standards, as well as sometimes validated use of NHS software infrastructure. Medtech companies need to be expert in all the standards organisations and their protocols, including HL7 International, ASTM International, DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) Standard Committee, and IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise).

Along with data preparation and interoperability, the research also found that UK and Ireland medtech companies are struggling to deal with the sheer volume of data, the complexities of managing privacy, of complying with data regulations, and of overcoming the challenges of heavily siloed data.

Complying with new regulation can be especially taxing for smaller and newer medtech companies. The EU MDR that came into force in May 2021 added significant burdens for data management. Devices in Class II under this directive face a far stricter set of regulations. In the UK, the new conformity standard for medical devices is set to be scheduled for implementation in 2024, the MHRA having revised its original timetable.

These findings, and the general state of the recruitment market mean medtechs cannot continue on the same path. To improve the developer experience, and ultimately retain and attract talent, medtech businesses should start implementing changes to reduce the amount of time developers spend on the basics of cleaning and organising data. Instead, they need to help the developers to focus on driving end products to market.

New tools – unified data platforms

To do this, medtechs should look to provide extra resources, employing the tools and technology that enable developers to automate significant parts of their workload. Solutions such as data platforms that make use of machine learning (ML) are a prime example. The use of this type of technology enables developers to easily add automation and predictions to applications without them needing to be experts in ML. In turn, this means that in-house developers are freed up to focus on evolving their product or service offering.

To offer transformational advantages, a third-party data platform should provide interoperability; the ability to orchestrate multiple interfaces; high-speed data storage; and “in-flight” data transformation. A platform such as this, that some leading analysts call a digital health platform, frees data scientists from the burdens of cleaning and preparing data. It also frees companies to address a far greater number of interoperability use cases without having to integrate multiple technologies and toolsets.

The benefits are not just in less drudgery, greater speed to market and operation, with an increase in the quality and accuracy for data preparation and cleaning, but in better morale and more fulfilling careers for developers. Which should in turn improve the retention of key talent, so avoiding continuous recruitment drives. It will also accelerate time-to-market with innovative products and happier customers that help companies thrive in today’s competitive landscape.