Rise up: To tech companies: Build for the bedside, not the boardroom

I’ve been using EMRs for nearly two decades. The product I use today is functionally identical to what I bought in 2007. Two decades of technological revolution—smartphones, cloud computing, artificial intelligence—and my clinical software has barely changed.Technology companies, we need to talk.You’re solving the wrong problemsMost health tech is built for administrators and payers, not clinicians. Dashboards are designed for executives tracking metrics. Reports satisfy billing requirements. Digital interfaces and processes prioritize data capture over care delivery.Meanwhile, I’m clicking through 17 screens to find a lab result. I’m copying and pasting between applications that refuse to talk to each other. I’m spending more time looking at my computer than at my patients.Here’s what I actually need: software that anticipates my next action. Tools that learn my patterns and automate the repetitive work. Systems that surface the right information at the right moment without me having to hunt for it. I don’t need more features. I need fewer clicks.Workflow is your productThe companies that will win in healthcare technology are those that understand a simple truth: workflow is the product. Not the software. Not the algorithm. The workflow.Every additional keystroke, every extra screen, every moment of friction—these compound across thousands of interactions daily. A small inefficiency multiplied by 40 patients a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year is not small. It’s crushing.Before you ship a feature, watch a clinician use it. Not in a demo environment—in a real clinic, with real patients, under real time pressure. If it doesn’t make their day measurably better, go back to the drawing board.Please, please, please, make it simple.Stop hiding behind integration challengesWhen vendors tell me their systems can’t share data because of technical complexity I know I’m being managed. Banks move money between institutions in milliseconds. Airlines coordinate global operations in real time. The barriers to healthcare interoperability are business decisions, not technical limitations.Open your APIs. Adopt standards genuinely, not performatively. Compete on the quality of your product, not on the stickiness of your data silos. The vendors who embrace interoperability will earn clinician trust—and that trust is worth more than any lock-in strategy.Do this because it’s the right thing to do by your customers, before legislation forces you to.AI is not a feature – it’s a responsibilityEvery health tech company is now an AI company. But slapping a language model onto a broken workflow doesn’t fix the workflow. It just adds another layer of complexity. And the tool will make errors if it receives instructions that don’t match the work.If you’re building AI tools for clinicians, remember: we’re not looking for artificial intelligence. We’re looking for actual intelligence—software that’s genuinely smart about how care happens. AI should free us to be more human with our patients, not create new documentation burdens or liability concerns.Build AI that knows when to stay quiet. That supports clinical judgment rather than overriding it. That makes us better doctors, not faster typists.Find blind spots. Help us make decisions in complexity. Get us closer to accuracy though awareness. Automate our repetition.The opportunityThe Canadian healthcare market is ready for technology that actually works. Clinicians are desperate for tools that respect their time and intelligence. Governments are prepared to fund solutions that deliver results.Build for the bedside, not the boardroom.The companies that do will define the future of healthcare.Dr. Darren Larsen is a health-tech consultant with more than three decades of experience in the medical and health information technology fields. This item originally appeared on his website.

Rise up: To tech companies: Build for the bedside, not the boardroom

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