How to Know if You Have What It Takes to Publish a High Quality Graduate Level MedTech Professional book (or as team to be in Healthcare at all)
–Reverse engineering builds for a long term best selling book in medical informatics, Mobile Medicine [1] as well as a highly anticipated second forthcoming #1 New Release in Medical Technology, Medical Informatics, Mobile + Wireless, the Advanced Health Technology book [2].
By: Sherri Douville, CEO & Mike Ng, Former Head of Ops/Chief of Staff at Medigram
We have been asked many times. Why do we publish with a top academic book publisher? We explained in our Medigram company letter to stakeholders that we use book creations as ecosystem engagement and training tools for our learning organization. This is with all essential medical, IT, cybersecurity, engineering, and legal stakeholders. This article is written for Medigram company stakeholders, current, and prospective book collaborators. In fact, delivering a best selling book for an academic publisher is a great way to gauge if your team should consider being in healthcare at all. Recognizing that software for medical technology requires newer skills to medical technology such as systems engineering, product management, product marketing for books, project management, and talent optimization. We’re honored to select gifted people to onboard to medical technology in our work at Medigram, Inc. One way we can screen for their ability for the extreme teamwork of medical technology needed is to see how they participate or help lead the highly regulated work of graduate level professional book publishing.
Anyone with experience in medical technology understands that it’s a world of “publish or perish.” Because of the necessary focus on evidence in medicine, stakeholders only accept information that has met a high quality bar. Meeting the requirements of academic publishers means as technologists and related businesspeople, that we can have a great shot at building real bridges with physicians and scientists. It’s hard and potentially impossible in clinical facing products to achieve this without the right level of quality publications. If you look across drugs, medical devices, and technologies –physicians just see these all as tools in patient care and they will all go through their evidence and credibility filters. The quality of the publication is crucial in this filtering process.
Why listen to us? We’re the leadership team that conceived of, built the team for, designed, managed, and delivered the best selling book, Mobile Medicine –in partnership with our extraordinary coauthor team of industry leaders.
Having top people in their respective fields contributing was a huge part of that success. Another critical ingredient was highly focused coordination and management for individual chapters and across the entire book. The latter is truly a litmus test if you and your team have what it takes to succeed in medical technology.
You have to plan to deliver across five buckets or programs of work for this kind of book:
- Research methods that are respected by a target audience whereas a large percentage will have rare and notable academic educations and careers; many times including multiple advanced degrees from preeminent universities.
- Content: structuring, motivating, leading, delivering
- Managing the publisher enterprise organization relationship
- Manuscript legal and production management
- Marketing the book/giving talks
Physicians and other stakeholders in medicine require more structure, process, and leadership than other kinds of customers. Top academic publishers also fall into this same category.
This is a level of detail, rules, precision, management, and leadership that many professionals, executives, and organizations are averse to or unaccustomed to. Or they expect someone else to be doing all the heavy lifting that goes along with highly regulated work. It all needs to be built into the work plans.
You also need balanced teams that comprise innovation leaders, people who balance the team, and results oriented operators to drive cadence and details.
Building a graduate level MedTech book is analogous to any work that successfully happens in medical technology and healthcare IT.
Different audiences will have different ideal target publications. While CIO’s, CISO’s, CTO’s and other general managers in healthcare are best served by Routledge, Taylor & Francis; Engineers are served well by Springer and other presses that are prominent in their respective fields. We were also honored to contribute here to an ethics in engineering Springer book [3]. Unfortunately or fortunately, you have to have credibility in both engineering and the medical fields to become actually effective in medical technology in a healthcare IT software context. The right level of publisher provides a highly prestigious platform, pays for digital marketing, design, copyediting, indexing, and book production, type setting, printing — if they accept your book proposal.
As an aside, much gratitude to Jodyn Platt, MPH, PhD who just earned tenure as a top researcher for trust in medical data for her teaching Sherri much of what she knows about academic publishing together with chapter coauthor Ann Mongoven MPH, PhD. in “How Can We Trust in IoT? The Role of Engineers in Ensuring Trust in the Clinical IoT Ecosystem”. These books are the ultimate extreme team sports, teams of teams.
It’s highly unlikely you’ll get rich publishing academic books or papers in an academic context but there are exciting bonuses and returns; they include seeing coauthors earn department chair and other promotions, define company and industry wide conference track or whole themes, step into their leadership, and so much more.
We hope that either you recognize yourself in this post and you become motivated to get started on your book; or alternatively you can more quickly recognize that medical technology is a poor fit for you and your team or organization due to the magnitude of details, rules, management, and leadership required. Either position is a winning hand that allows you to make the best use of and prevent wasting yours and others’ time.
By Sherri Douville & Mike Ng
[1] Douville, S. (Ed.). (2021). Mobile Medicine: Overcoming People, Culture, and Governance (1st ed.). Productivity Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003220473
[2] Douville, S. (Ed.). (2023). Advanced Health Technology: Managing Risk While Tackling Barriers to Rapid Acceleration (1st ed.). Productivity Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003348603
[3] Platt, J., Douville, S., Mongoven, A. (2022). How Can We Trust in IoT? The Role of Engineers in Ensuring Trust in the Clinical IoT Ecosystem. In: Hudson, F.D. (eds) Women Securing the Future with TIPPSS for Connected Healthcare. Women in Engineering and Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93592-4_5
