CEO @ Peach Health Asia | Two decades of successful experience bringing digital health, pharma and medtech companies into Asia
A recent discussion with a potential B2B partner highlighted to me a different viewpoint when looking at the problem digital health product interoperability. Specifically how to make digital health products 'functionally' interoperable across different countries and local B2B partners. Lots of attention is going into data interoperability to figure out how different data streams can be combined in an efficient manner. Its no surprise why, the push to personalise patient treatments (including the use of AI / ML supported tools) relies on the ability to cross analyse discrete patient data sets from different sources. Peach Health Asia's role in commercialising partner digital health products across different channels gives us a unique opportunity to explore setting up commercial partnerships with varied B2B partners with different needs, systems and capabilities. Rather than look at this as a 'customisation' exercise doing this cost-efficiently is more an interoperability question tied to how versatile a product is in being deployed under different scenarios. One of the key parameters to address this challenge is the modularity of the product and whether its features be turned off and on without disrupting the product functionality. It isn't something that is top of mind for digital health developers when creating their products, products are usually designed for a single product-market fit. However in the international market no countries market and 'market opportunities' are exactly the same. The article below covers some of the solutions needed to deal with this challenge, such as setting up functions in microservices to enable modulatory and using more widely used API's. It is incredibly difficult and costly to customise a digital health product for every new market or opportunity, especially when dealing with products where a class I or II SaMD registration limits the ability to modify a product once it is approved. Don't forget going international also comes served with the whole data interoperability challenge, which represents another issue that needs to be sorted out when exploring bringing a digital health product into SE Asia.
