Why your #healthtech pizza can’t have too many toppings.

Have you ever been so exhausted with making decisions at work that you decide you just want pizza for dinner (any pizza, as long as someone else decides the toppings)? This decision fatigue (1) is a very real experience for all types of doctors and health professionals who spend their day taking important decisions with life or death consequences immediately or in the future. There has even been a scale developed to assess how health professionals are affected by this (2).

So when you present your amazing healthtech product with its many multiple options to clinicians, don’t feel offended that their eyes glaze over, or even droop. It’s not a case of reducing your offer of special functions available exclusive to your digital health product. Instead, tailor your product to the needs of the health professional in front of you.

What you really need to do is to know which functions will change their practise, decrease their levels of frustration with IT and set it up for them. Of course, they can do it themselves (this and a few more complicated procedures such as saving lives), but if you do it for them, you get a foot in the door. Leave it to them, and it will be pushed to the bottom of the non-urgent pile, and that is how digital health products end up not being implemented.

You can rail against health professionals pushing back against tech, but the reality is that if it doesn’t work for them, you are going to be the one left on the outside.

1. Linder JA, Doctor JN, Friedberg MW, et al. Time of Day and the Decision to Prescribe Antibiotics. JAMA Intern Med. 2014;174(12):2029–2031. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2014.5225 

2. Hickman RL, Pignatiello GA, Tahir S. Evaluation of the Decisional Fatigue Scale Among Surrogate Decision Makers of the Critically Ill. West J Nurs Res. 2018;