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 Today in Health it, the story is hiring or becoming ACMO for digital health. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Sirius Healthcare is a proud partner of today in Health IT and our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

Check them out at sirius com. Dot com slash healthcare. If you believe in our mission and want to become a partner as well, shoot a note to partner at this week in health it.com. And now on to today's story. Chrissy Farr, formerly with M-S-N-B-C, used to write really healthcare and digital health stories for them.

Ha has moved on to doing investing, but she's still writing and I'm really glad for that. She has a great knack and a great network of people that she can tap into. Uh, she tackles this idea of the CMO role in digital health. And she looks at it from a lot of different perspectives. I like all the questions that she addresses in this article.

Uh, first of all, she talks about the type of CMO, uh, roles and jobs. Uh, she talks about mixing the two cultures and how important culture is, uh, and how difficult tech and medicine I. Sometimes don't come together real well. And the CMO is where they intersect for the most part. She talks about where founders should recruit CMOs.

She talks about embedding clinicians into the organization. Uh, she talks about if you should continue to practice or not, uh, what level of clinician training is necessary to go into digital health. And then she talks about some jobs that are available out there. And again, a great piece. I'm gonna touch on a couple of these things.

You know, when you look at the CMO jobs, I was talking to a physician who's looking at the CMO role, and we started talking about, you know, the, the people I've seen in the role, and they really do fall into this category. There's, there's four categories that are talked about, and this is from the article.

According to accolades, CMO, Dr. Hannu Nun. There are four major types of CMO roles he tends to see in digital health, CMO of product CMO of sales, CMO of clinical operations and CMO optics. Interesting in and of itself. I mean, we could do the whole rundown just on, on this itself. CMO of product is probably, and they actually go on to talk about this.

It's probably one of the rare roles that you see out there. And that's the person who can really step into the product development, interact with the developers, interact with, you know, where the, the patients and, and, and the clinicians. It depends on what you're developing, right? But in that intersection, and they live in that space and they're able to guide and shepherd the product development.

This takes a little bit more . Technical background, tech, technical acumen, or at least the ability to learn that side of it so that you can interact with those developers and usher the product forward. CMO of sales I find to be, uh, the most common. And it's also noted in the article that it's the most common.

This is the medical officer that you see in C one A of the plane, right? They are flying everywhere. They are the subject matter expert that provides credibility to the product itself. And you see them on social media. You see them, uh, speaking on, uh, wherever their, their media outlets allow them to get to.

They could be. On news shows, good Morning America, they could be on that kind of uh, uh, circuit. They can be on the social media circuit, they can be on the podcast circuit. There's a lot of different places they can be, but they lend credibility to the product in the marketplace. The next is CMO of clinical operations, and I think that's pretty self-explanatory.

It gets the product into the clinical workflow and then the CMO optics I found to be interesting, but was not all that surprising. And that's the person that you hire for optics. Right. You hire the big name doctor and you, you roll them out for conferences and those kind of things. So those are the four.

And I think that in and of itself is very interesting. CMO product, CMO Sales, CMO, clinical operations, CMO Optics goes on to talk about mixing the two cultures. And this is where I think, uh, the main point that I'm gonna pull from later and talk about Dr. Davis. . Lou from Telemedicine Startup Lemonade said it's important that doctors moving into to health Tech have a curiosity growth mindset and be open to healthy levels of conflict with other teams.

It should be task related versus personal. I. He stresses. Uh, mixing these two cultures is not always easy. You know, the, you you're brought up in healthcare to mitigate risk, mitigate as much risk as you can, mitigate all risk. Uh, in, in some cases health tech and health tech startups need some of that healthcare background of, Hey, you know what you're getting out there on the edge.

Uh, this may not be possible and those kind of things, but a lot of times when these two cultures come together, the healthcare side of it just says that's not possible, that's not legal, that's not, you know, there's just a very, um, can't be done kind of mindset because you're, mi you in the best spirit of things, right?

You're trying to mitigate as much risk as possible, but in reality, it's on the other side of it can't be done. Where the breakthroughs happen. And so it takes the right clinician to, to step into that role and say, alright, I'll let you go over that boundary a little bit and see where it takes us. But at some point they have to step in and say, you know what?

That is, that that's a bridge too far or that's going in the wrong direction. Uh, otherwise you end up with Theranos, I guess is, uh, is the big risk that's out there or talked about the most. If you're a founder looking for some of these physicians, . There's a lot of different directions you can go, and she talks about that in this, uh, she talks about embedding clinicians.

She talks about the practice or not, you know, when, when it comes to practice, there's, there's a lot of different. Schools of thought, uh, one school of thought is I'm gonna continue to practice. Uh, you can't practice 40 hours there and, and do a digital health job. So there's a question of, you know, how, how much do you practice and how safe is it for you to practice?

Right? If you're only practicing, uh, I don't know, four, six hours a week, off hours kind of thing, you know, one of the things that doctors worry about is, am I losing the knowledge I need to, to be effective? Only you can really answer that question. But the value of practicing is that you remain relevant.

That you remain in the, in the practice of medicine, that you remain in the EHR, that remain in the, uh, technology. So you're, uh, you're current with the things that you're talking about. Uh, the reason to not to practice, to be honest with you, is it's a foot in both boats kind of thing. Right. Are you gonna get all in?

Are you gonna get into the side and say, look, my, my role now is digital health. I am going to be all in on this side. And yes, you know, I could practice, but I choose not to practice so that I can really give myself to this, to this new role. So there's a lot of different directions you can go with regard to that.

And then what level of clinical training is necessary. I found the, the best part of this piece, uh, around this question was EZ Partovi, who is a physician. He's with Amazon, you know, he says oversimplifying, uh, one med school teaches you to learn the science of medicine. Two residency. It gives you the application of science and to learn to deliver care safely.

Uh, three is practice, and that is making a living from care delivery. In his opinion, you can't lead digital care transformation without experience in all three categories. Again, it's uh, and actually goes on to talk about some really cool jobs that are out there. You know, it's a really good piece. My so what for this is, I, I found like in other roles, cultural fit is probably the most important indicator for future success.

That is matching the goals of the organization with the hire. If you are a leader looking to hire a physician, figure out what the goals of your, or. Organization are, and, and then hire appropriately into that. You know, clearly expertise and reputation are important factors, no doubt. But when you plug a person into a leadership role, it has to work.

It has to feel natural, and it has to make the whole team better. And so finding that cultural fit, I think from a, from a leader standpoint, is incredibly important. But from a. Physician going into digital health. I would say the same thing. Make sure you're hiring into the right role, the role that you have imagined in your head.

Ask the questions to make sure that that is what the role is and, and in some cases you may not want to take all the answers at face value. You may want to. Uh, you may wanna push in, ask others in the industry, uh, about the company you're looking to hire into. Interview other people within the organization to get their picture of what the role is so that you make sure you're stepping into a role where you can be successful.

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