How we innovate our product fast for customers

In the historically slow moving healthcare IT industry Relaymed innovates by delivering value from new features and improvements to customers fast. Very fast. We can do this because we harness the agility of the cloud. This requires doing things differently — disrupting — to most others in healthcare, but the benefits we gain from continuous improvement, speed to release and responsiveness are huge.

We want to build a product and company that customers love.

As a healthcare technology consumer today, your perception is that deploying a new product into your day-to-day operations will be challenging, and time consuming. You’d expect to setup a whole project around it with staff resources dedicated to the sole purpose of “going live”. That sounds crazy to us.

And you’re determined that everything is perfect out of the gate, as getting any changes down the line from the vendor will be difficult. If you find something that you think should be fixed or changed with the product, one sentence that is often used to negotiate / delay you out of it is: “That will require development work, we’ll add it to our roadmap…”

But why? Isn’t development work exactly what a healthcare technology company should do?! And shouldn’t they do it fast? We certainly believe so.

As healthcare is a heavily regulated and complex industry, the standard approach taken by vendors is to use outdated technology and deploy a static solution on premise. Whilst this ensures an install, this introduces operational challenges with every update. So updates become very far apart and extremely large and complex, making a bad situation even worse.

It does not have to be this way! Moving software to the cloud is the solution and enables our approach.

Continuous improvement

At Relaymed, we’re disrupting the healthcare IT industry by developing a cloud based product that is continuously improving. We recognized our product would and should get better as we grow — and we do this by listening and learning from our customers every day. This is where the true value to customers is found, as their needs are evolving and our product needs to continuously evolve and grow with them to stay relevant.

This is why we built Relaymed to be truly agile. As illustrated in Henrik Kniberg’s famous blog post, being agile doesn’t mean building a product in iterations (first wheels, then body, then steering wheel and so on). Being agile is about making sure each iteration is providing increased value to customers in increments, but that each one is completely usable so that you can gather feedback and learn.

We’ll continue with the car metaphor from Henrik’s blog. Relaymed started out with a laser focus as a connectivity solution, to transfer point-of-care test results from A to B – that was our skateboard and enabled our first customers. Then we expanded to offer a fully automated workflow (scooter) and added moderately complex devices (bike). Recently, we focused on adding features that enhance our data management offering such as fully customizable demographic reference ranges and abnormals, automated QC logs reporting and many more. Now we have a car!

And the best part of this approach? As everything is done in the cloud, all customers immediately benefit from all new features without having to do anything. It’s just there.

Speed to release

At Relaymed we believe product innovation should be fast. We regularly release code changes to our production environment within days or even hours from when it started to be worked on. This means we’re making releases almost every day, making releasing our heartbeat.

We do this so you can say goodbye to typical timelines of months and quarters you may get from other vendors to get development work done and released. At Relaymed we understand that customers’ needs must be met much faster than that, as their business can’t stand still.

We know that speed is our advantage and we never want to slow down.

A very short feedback loop with our customers, enabled by regular releases, is crucial so we can make sure that not only does a release work technically, but seamlessly “in the real world” of a busy practice workflow — as our customers understand their constraints, patient care and staff better than anyone.

As middleware, Relaymed has integrations with a long list of EHRs and point-of-care devices, which we add to constantly. We do this by adding a new EHR or device integration in a series of small and rapid iterations, delivering immediate value to customers whilst also ensuring a seamless workflow experience.

Responsive

Being agile also means that you are being responsive. A product roadmap cannot be locked down for quarters — or even years at a time! And the people we are responsive to are our customers.

That could be because you have a new device at the practice that you need integrated, a change in legislation or a recommendation in a CLIA inspection. Whatever it is, we work with our customers to ensure these short cycles of releases are maintained.

Our short cycles allow us to have a rapid turnaround time, so that if we get a request (e.g. to support a new test type for a device) we are able to deploy this within days or even hours. How many other healthcare software companies you work with can claim that?

For us the highest level of customer support can only come from such rapid turnaround times. Our customers know that their voice will be heard and acted upon, within timescales that exceed their preconceptions.

Discover Relaymed

Relaymed is innovative, different to anything else on the market, both in terms of product and company approach. A solution that will always be improving, based on your needs, which you will love.

Find out today how you can benefit from our disruptive approach. And how soon! Relaymed does not require a project plan to be created to “go live”. It’s fast because it’s been designed to be.

Schedule a 1:1 online demo today. It will take just 15 minutes, no fuss, no obligation.