Valdez-Olmos: Traditional whiteboard software design fails in home healthcare
Renato Valdez-Olmos · a16z Podcast | The Realities of Aging / When Healthcare Is Local · Jan 2, 2019 · at 16:43
Renato Valdez-Olmos, an executive and product designer at Honor, explains why software engineers and product managers must conduct in-person fieldwork to design tools for frontline home caregivers.
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“Most of us have been spending most of our professional lives designing applications behind the screens, within offices, in front of whiteboards. And those methods are very, it's a very cultural process that doesn't necessarily apply to the problems that we're trying to solve on a larger scale here. So you won't know what a Care professional feels like when they're going to a customer, unless you actually do that.”
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More from Renato Valdez-Olmos
Valdez-Olmos: Most eldercare products are designed without involving seniors
“And this is like, when you look at products for the elderly in general, like almost every single one has been designed without The actual elder involved.”
Valdez-Olmos: Discharged hospital patients recover faster at home
“So after, after people get, you know, dispatched from a hospital and go back home, like they recover faster in their homes because they're accustomed to that space.”
Valdez-Olmos: Honor partnered with Walmart for eldercare education centers
“Like we started a partnership with Walmart where we opened up care education centers inside of specific Walmart stores in Texas.”
Valdez-Olmos: Homogenizing the elderly is a gross design misconception
“A gross misconception is talking about the elderly in general, and just people thinking that, you know, when you become 65, suddenly you start walking with a cane and have hard candy in your pockets, and that's like, that's it.”
Valdez-Olmos: Caregivers lack enterprise software, unlike Silicon Valley workers
“Most of our care professionals haven't used phones in order to do their work. Like there's no Salesforce for caregivers or no Photoshop for caregivers. So it's like most people in Silicon Valley are very used to having all of these amazing tools in order to do…”