Product Hacker

There’s a new class of digital wellness tools rising to prominence on the market: apps that help people directly manage their conditions, and can open that care up to more people in the process.

We spoke with CEO William Gadsden and pain psychologist Dr. Caryn Seebach from Ctrl M Health, a Philadelphia-based startup that's partnered with the headache center at Jefferson Health to create a first-of-its-kind integrated digital platform that helps people living with chronic headaches and migraines access a personalized plan of support through an innovative mobile app and a line of evidence-based supplements.

We're also joined by Arcweb UX architect Mike Balcerzak, who worked with the Ctrl M team and helped bring their app to life.

Ctrl M Health website: https://ctrlmhealth.com/

Music by Prox-C.

The 21st Century Cures Act and its accompanying legislation are poised to have far-reaching impacts on every aspect of digital health and health IT, from patient experience and interoperability to innovation and regulatory compliance. This week Kurt & Shahrukh sit down with Ken Kleinberg and Pooja Babbrah from the health IT consultancy Point-of-Care Partners to explore the ins and outs of these new regulations and what they mean for the future of healthcare.

Make sure to check out the other half of our cross-over on POCP's The Dish on Health IT podcast, where Kurt & Mark discussed innovation strategies and software development in health IT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28L3rTHrmYs  

More about Point-of-Care Partners: www.pocp.com

This week we're joined by Ankit Mathur, CTO of the non-emergency medical transport company RoundTrip, to discuss the impact of transportation on patient experience and its role as a social determinant of health. We discuss the opportunities for reducing complexity in transportation booking, potential impacts outside of medical contexts, and some of the challenges and successes they've encountered as a technology organization.

To learn more about Roundtrip, visit https://www.roundtriphealth.com

There's a behavioral health crisis in rural America, with a lack of providers, coverage gaps, and poor access to treatment creating a recipe for disaster. Luckily, technologies like telehealth and telepsych might be able to help.

This week we’re joined by pediatrician and pandemic response expert Dr. Michael Consuelos to discuss his new article in Scientific American about using technology to address the challenges of rural healthcare delivery. We also discuss how COVID-19 is impacting telehealth adoption, how we can design more engaging digital health experiences, and what digital health designers can learn from mobile games. This episode is part of Engineering Healthcare, our new series on healthcare experiences and technology.

Dr. Michael J. Consuelos is the Principal at MJC Solutions, a veteran-owned, small business that provides professional consulting and advisory services to organizations serving the healthcare sector. He is a Pediatrician and healthcare executive that has held several leadership roles in emergency preparedness and pandemic response since 1997.

Dr. Consuelos’s Scientific American article: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/rural-communities-have-a-behavioral-health-treatment-problem/
Dr. Consuelos on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mjconsuelos
Pivoting Around a Pandemic: http://www.pivotmethod.com/podcast/pandemic

New healthcare data regulations are on the way, and they're going to totally change the way we think about patient data, privacy, and more. In this mini-sode, Product Hacker does a deep dive on the 21st Century Cures act: what it is, why it matters, and how it's going to change digital health forever.

Produced by Martin R. Schneider. Music by Prox-C and Blue Dot Sessions

Each year, companies miss out on billions of dollars of potential revenue by not giving their employees a chance to innovate. On this mini-sode, we take a look at the high cost of lost entrepreneurship and offer up one methodology that can help even the biggest company innovate like a startup.

Produced by Martin R. Schneider. Music by Prox-C and:

Music from https://filmmusic.io:
"Comfortable Mystery 2" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

"Wholesome" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Customer experience AI has been buzzed about for years, but with little to show for it. That’s finally starting to change, with massive growth in personalization, automation, and more. But how do you SELL AI and automation? And more importantly, how do you introduce it to an existing product line?

We interviewed Brian O’Neill of Monetate, a company that’s grown from marketing analytics to full-on AI-enabled customer experience personalization. As Monetate’s CTO, he’s overseen the company's technical strategy and growth, and had a front row seat to major shifts in technology, positioning, and value proposition.

Learn more about Monetate over at their website.

Produced by Martin R. Schneider. Music by Prox-C and KieLoKaz. 

The use and abuse of digital products has been big news over the last 12 months. From hostile design and privacy breaches to basic corporate responsibility, people are taking a closer look at the ethical ramifications of our increasingly digital world. And they’re not liking what they’re finding.

This month, we're spoke with researcher and lecturer Dr. Faye Miller about why digital product ethics are so important and how companies can do a better job of tackling the challenge head-on. 

Produced by Martin R. Schneider. Music by Prox-C

Innovation in the public sector comes with a whole new set of challenges. We spoke with Erik Johanson, director of innovation at SEPTA, about the ins and outs of driving innovative thinking, managing change, and finding clever solutions to budgetary constraints while meeting the daily transportation needs of 1.5 million Philadelphians.

About SEPTA:

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority – better known to Philly locals as SEPTA – provides regional mass transit for the entire Philadelphia area and operates a network of trolleys, busses, subways, and commuter rail.

About Erik:

Erik is the Director of Innovation for SEPTA. He heads up the organization's innovation team, which focuses on finding new ways to improve the agency’s operations and further its core mission of meetings the daily transportation needs of the city’s 1.5 million residents.

Produced by Martin R. Schneider. Music by Prox-C

Product market fit is at the heart of every product decision, from features to architecture. But how can you find market fit in today's constantly shifting tech landscape? We spoke with Ubek Ergashev of Comcast's machineQ IoT platform about making the pivot from infrastructure to product company, the state of IoT, and how to make technology selections that won't come back to haunt you.

About machineQ:

machineQ is an enterprise-grade IoT platform that helps businesses build, manage, and scale their own IoT networks and solutions. Based in Philadelphia and incubated out of Comcast, machineQ delivers best-in-class LoRa®-based hardware, enterprise grade software, and IoT expertise that speeds up innovation and reduces time to market.

About Ubek:

Ubek Ergashev is a Product Manager for machineQ. Over the course of the last twelve months he’s led the effort to build the machineQ ecommerce store and mobile app, which will enable customers to purchase machineQ’s IoT hardware products like gateways and sensors, and make it simple and easy to get them up and running for their business.

Produced by Martin R. Schneider. Music by Prox-C and Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Managing one product is hard enough. What do you do when it's time to add more? On this episode, we speak with Brian Glick of Chain.io about adopting a multi-product strategy, understanding customer value across multiple products, differentiating company brand from product brand, and what product managers can learn from sales teams.

About Chain.io:

Through its cloud execution platform, Chain.io helps medium and large enterprises integrate all the systems components that it takes to keep the global supply chain moving. Connecting ocean carriers, customs brokers, retailers, truckers, and warehouses, just to name a few, Chain.io does connects the hundreds of systems that have to coordinate behind the scenes for every shipment, every day.

About Brian:

During two decades in global logistics, Brian has helped major retail and apparel companies develop and integrate global supply chain management systems spanning tens of thousands of vendors and partners across the globe.  In 2010, Brian founded Aspect 9, which delivered trade compliance software to major companies with worldwide operations.  Brian sold Aspect 9 to Vandegrift Forwarding, where he remained until 2017 when he founded Chain.io.

Produced by Martin R. Schneider. Music by Prox-C and The Custodian of Records.

Frustrating, confusing, and obtuse – bad voice interfaces are a uniquely terrible experience. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple have raised the bar on what "good" voice looks like, but there's still work to do.

This month, we talk to Len Damico, Arcweb's head of design, about what makes a voice interface good, what makes it bad, and why it's so dang irritating when things go wrong.

Music by Prox-C

Automation helps companies save millions of dollars a year by taking humans out of the customer support process. But at what cost? We present a brief cautionary tale about customer satisfaction, project management, and the future of machine learning.

Hosted by Kurt Schiller, producer by Martin R. Schneider. 

Klockworx Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Tranquility Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Most companies keep their users' wants and needs close to heart. So how did Facebook go so far off-course when it came to user data? 

Music by Prox-C and Daniel Birch with edits by Product Hacker producer Martin Schneider.

With tens of millions of Amazon Echos sold and digital assistants now standard on most smartphones, voice interfaces have finally arrived. But voice presents unique challenges for product designers, including security, accessibility, and a lack of established UX conventions. 

Join guests Shahrukh Tarapore and Mark Hughey as we explore the ins and outs of building products in a voice-powered world.

Music by Prox-C with edits by Product Hacker producer Martin Schneider.

Your house, your fridge, your car, even your pacemaker – “smart” devices have taken over the world. But as businesses rush to tap into these new sources of user data, they run the risk of crashing headlong into a bevy of serious privacy and ethical concerns.

Join guests Mark Hughey and Shahrukh Tarapore as we continue our discussion of emerging technologies by diving deep into the Internet of Things. From supply chain management and healthcare to white-hat hackers and “instant owning,” it’s a strange new world of data.