Bridging Clinical and Engineering in tech innovation

As a Chief Nursing Officer in a health tech startup, I’ve been uniquely positioned to bridge the worlds of clinical practice and technology. Over the past year, I’ve led the integration of our nursing workforce optimization platform with Assuta Medical Centers, Israel’s premier healthcare system. This partnership placed me at the intersection of clinical leadership on the client side and our internal tech and product teams, where I had to balance expectations, promote collaboration, and ensure the delivery of a product that truly added value.

On the client side, clinical leadership sought measurable improvements in staffing efficiency, while our team aimed to deliver innovative solutions within technical constraints. In every seller-client relationship, the stakes are high. Healthcare is no exception, sometimes, even more heavy lifting is required. After all, we are talking about patient care, and it gets as serious as it gets.  It is not a secret that selling cycles are substantial in healthcare (some sources report up to 24 months!), thus, once you start, you want your integration to be as smooth as possible. Through this journey, I’ve identified five critical practices for bridging the gap between clinical and tech teams. These practices are grounded in experience, supported by research, and made tangible through results.

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1. Understand the Client’s Pain Points in Depth

Effective collaboration begins with truly understanding the client’s pain points—not just the ones they articulate but also the ones they may not fully recognize themselves. At Assuta, initial discussions centered around improving workforce scheduling. The core challenge was to ensure the right balance between the number of nurses and the number of patients, avoiding both overstaffed and understaffed shifts. However, after engaging directly with their clinical champions (head nurses) and observing workflows, we uncovered a more layered issue: not only is the organization seeking to improve the workforce scheduling (and cut costs), but they also spend lots of time doing so. There are different software pieces to it and in general, the whole process is challenging. 

By identifying this underlying problem, and gathering ongoing feedback from our nursing champions we were able to tailor our platform to address it directly. This approach not only strengthened trust with the client but also demonstrated our commitment to delivering real solutions, not just generic tools.

Research Insight: Direct observation of clinical work provides an opportunity to gain new insights into the relationships between the way work is performed in everyday situations. Data focusing on clinical workflow and clinical outcomes are essential for identifying critical issues and organizational solutions to improve the quality of care, ensuring reasonable workloads and the well-being and safety of both healthcare providers and patients. [1].

2. Facilitate Cross-Functional Collaboration with Clear Roles

Clarity in roles can lead to communication and delays in projects involving both clinical and tech teams. To counter this, we created a structured collaboration model. Clinical leadership provided strategic oversight, while clinical champions acted as our main point of contact for feedback and testing. On our side, a product manager and project manager worked closely to ensure alignment across teams.

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IHH Collaborative Model

• Having a project manager with a clinical background (myself), had a great value, as the common language was quickly established. 

This diagram illustrates how clinical leadership, clinical champions, product managers, and tech teams worked together with bidirectional communication at each level. This structure was critical in reducing misunderstandings and ensuring that all stakeholders were engaged and aligned.

Research insight: A cross-functional team (XFT) is formed in response to a very specific business need and is chartered to deliver specific business outcomes. Team members are assigned clear roles and responsibilities to optimize collaboration and ensure all functional requirements are addressed while achieving consensus on maximizing overall business objectives.[2]

3. Leverage Data to Align Expectations and Measure Success

Data is a critical bridge between clinical and tech teams. At Assuta, we benchmarked key operational metrics, such as shift numbers per week, meaning of overstuffed and understaffed shifts, and the method we are going to use internally in IHH,  before (and during) implementing our platform. Post-implementation, we tracked these metrics and demonstrated measurable outcomes. One significant milestone was the establishment of a standardized and mutually agreed-upon framework for discussing workload during shifts. Assuta, as a corporate entity, utilizes a methodology similar to Hours Per Patient Day (HPPD), which measures total nursing hours against total patient hospitalization hours over a minimum period of one month. In contrast, In-House Health employs the Patient Per Nurse (PPN) ratio, a forward-looking metric designed to predict staffing needs for specific shifts. While these two KPIs differ in resolution, they ultimately measure the same core concept from complementary perspectives. 

Assuta Key Results (originally published in Becker's)

• A 28% reduction in the "difficulty of making and updating the schedule"
• A 14% increase in "confidence that the schedule is accurate to patient care needs" 

4. Build Trust Through Transparency and Iterative Development

Transparency is the cornerstone of trust, especially in a seller-client dynamic. At Assuta, we adopted an iterative development process, delivering functional changes (requested by our champions) often for review. This approach allowed us to incorporate real-time feedback and make adjustments early in the development cycle.

For example, early testing revealed that the numbers of census, discharges, and admissions are “behind-click” (meaning the user had to take a few extra steps just to see this valuable information), and are not immediately visible to the head nurses. Addressing this issue early in the development ensured a smoother rollout and higher user adoption.

Research Insight: User-centred design (UCD) prioritizes the needs of users and nurtures a symbiotic relationship between individuals and products. This approach results in the creation of health technologies that meet users' specific requirements, significantly improving patient care in the healthcare industry [3].

5. Identify and Engage Relevant Stakeholders Early

A key step in connecting clinical and tech teams is involving a relevant stakeholder from the start. This person acts as a link between the two sides, helping to align goals, build trust, and improve communication. At Assuta, this role was filled by a senior nursing manager and the head of the operational excellence department, who not only understood the clinical workflows intimately but also had a forward-thinking approach to technology adoption.

These stakeholders became advocates for the project internally, helping to communicate the benefits of the platform to other team members and ensuring timely feedback during iterative development phases. By having someone who could speak for us internally, we were able to maintain momentum and address resistance effectively.

Research Insight: With a clear mandate, dedicated time, and proper training, health personnel in champion roles can significantly contribute professional, technological, and personal competencies to facilitate technology adoption within healthcare services.[5]. 

Research shows that actively involving stakeholders early in a project fosters shared commitment and helps identify and address critical issues systematically throughout the research and implementation process. [6].

Conclusion

Bridging the gap between clinical and tech teams is not just about creating a product—it’s about building relationships, fostering understanding, and delivering results that matter. Through this project with Assuta, I’ve learned that success hinges on four key principles: deeply understanding client pain points, fostering structured collaboration, leveraging data, and building trust through transparency.

Health tech is a unique and evolving field where technology must meet the realities of clinical practice. By adopting these best practices, we can not only bridge the gap but also create solutions that improve patient care, enhance operational efficiency, and make a lasting impact.

References

1. Tanzini, M., Westbrook, J.I., Guidi, S., Sunderland, N., Prgomet, M. (2021). Measuring Clinical Workflow to Improve Quality and Safety. In: Donaldson, L., Ricciardi, W., Sheridan, S., Tartaglia, R. (eds) Textbook of Patient Safety and Clinical Risk Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59403-9_28
2. https://scm.ncsu.edu/scm-articles/article/the-critical-role-of-the-cross-functional-team
3. https://healthmanagement.org/c/it/post/the-importance-of-user-centred-design-in-healthcare-technology?
4. Pettersen, S., Eide, H. & Berg, A. The role of champions in the implementation of technology in healthcare services: a systematic mixed studies review. BMC Health Serv Res 24, 456 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-024-10867-7
5. https://mdisrupt.com/blog/healthtech/clinicians-in-product-development/
6. Boaz, A., Hanney, S., Borst, R. et al. How to engage stakeholders in research: design principles to support improvement. Health Res Policy Sys 16, 60 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-018-0337-6