The No. 1 frustration I hear from clinicians when implementing Digital Health pathways for patients: “We didn’t realize it would take THIS long to develop and customize the clinical content.” How long are we talking about? Sometimes clinicians have spent over 1-2 YEARS trying to get a single pathway off the ground (e.g. pre/post total joints). The worst stories are the ones where clinicians spend 1-2 years… and it never even goes live. They just give up. Yikes! Now when done right and facilitated by a team with a playbook and the right expertise, it should NOT take anywhere near this long. I know this because @SeamlessMD implements digital care journeys at health systems in 9 weeks. So why does it take so long for many health systems? They often assume all of the content/protocols already exist within their own clinical teams in the perfect format, so they just simply need to copy and paste it into the tech platform. That it’s just this one step of digitization. When in REALITY it’s far more complex and takes way more steps to do successfully: → You HAVE to leverage a proven template and then customize it to support the current state. Why? Because your existing content/protocols are not at all designed for digital care (e.g. your instructions are not currently designed as time-based reminders or symptom monitoring workflows). Starting 80% of the way there with a template is critical for clinician buy-in. It’s always easier to start with a draft than start at a blank page. Skip this at your own peril… → Map out the current state by collecting current patient instructions, education and speaking with clinical teams to understand what they’re currently telling patients. You’d be surprised at the variation in education currently happening, and you will need to achieve some standardization. In fact, view the Digital Health implementation as an opportunity to standardize best practice care! → Map out what new elements clinicians want to enable that didn’t exist before - e.g. symptom monitoring algorithms/workflows, PROMs data collection, etc. There are many elements of digital care journeys that were not happening on paper in the first place, but clinicians will now want to adopt with technology. → Get alignment between clinicians on what should go into the digital care plan. Unless you want to manage 50 different versions of the Digital Health solution you have to get alignment. It takes real Clinical Change Management expertise and playbook to facilitate this among physicians, nurses, allied health etc. → Align on the clinical workflows (e.g. are alerts and monitoring dashboards turned on for the clinical team?). Yes it also takes real Clinical Change Management to get alignment here. Who will lead that conversation? Take all of these steps and expect a clinical team to figure this all out on their own and do all of it on their own time… and you can see why it can take 1-2 years without the right partner, expertise and playbook.