Ramin Vantanparast is Proximie’s new Chief Product & Technology Officer, following his past roles as Director of Product Management and Chief Product Officer for Meta and Trustpilot respectively. Here, he lays out his roadmap for the development of Proximie’s products and technology.
As Chief Product & Technology officer, I’m responsible, with my team, for not only building the backbone and the platform that will allow Proximie to scale and grow, but also for defining the user experiences that we offer our customers and clients, and which ultimately drive our mission.
In the last two days alone, I’ve spent around 16 hours with surgeons talking about every aspect of what we’re working towards and how it would impact their practice in the real world. I may have opinions on what would make a good product, but at the end of the day it’s the surgeons’ work that has to benefit, so their experience is at the core of everything we do. We have to provide them with the tools and facilities that will enable them to do the work they love more effectively and easily than before. So we are constantly in direct communication with surgeons, and other health care practitioners, and tailoring everything to their needs, as well as bearing in mind features that could help other staff in the operating room and hospitals.
The openness of the Proximie platform gives us the opportunity to offer far greater and faster solutions to customers. User experience is extremely important to get right for our customers; we want to be sure that the entire process from onboarding Proximie in operating rooms to surgeons interacting with the platform, engaging with other users and communicating through augmented reality should be as intuitive and comfortable as possible. We’re also focusing on being able to analyse user-generated videos and content to gather more information, data and insights, that will help health systems improve surgical procedures in the future. Ultimately, this content will be a vehicle for education, and the mobile applications we are building will get the content to the surgeons who need to see it. Our platform will be a means of transferring knowledge, enabling us to democratise healthcare on a number of different levels.
On the product and organisation side we have product managers, designers, programmers and engineers. We’re defining what technologies and platforms we have to build, because we are evolving very quickly and need to keep adapting. That involves looking at a huge variety of innovations in order to build a platform that not only allows us to develop technologies on it, but also opens up that platform so that users and third party technologies will be able to contribute to it as well.
We have already implemented the framework for connecting individuals to one another, enabling them to virtually scrub-in to operating rooms. Those live telehealth capabilities are in place, opening up a great opportunity for us to record those sessions and place the recordings in a content management system that makes it easy for surgeons to search and view material that’s of interest to them. Proximie is a network where surgeons can both create and consume content, so an on-the-go surgeon could quickly view the crucial elements of a procedure to learn techniques, for example, or record an innovative or particularly effective way of performing a procedure and share it. Social media companies have harnessed the creator economy for entertainment and advertising; we are starting to see Proximie’s creator economy, engagement and interaction to be built around sharing and fostering expertise.
We want to reach more users proactively and create an even greater sense of community. For example, users don’t currently have the option of knowing what live surgery is happening in various locations around the world. We want to cater to our users’ interests, so that a surgeon might get a notification that at 9am there will be a live surgery taking place somewhere in the world that is related to their speciality – and that they can join the live stream to see how it’s being done. Another application is live telepresence, that allows surgeons to be in multiple locations across the globe, saving multiple lives without actually having to leave their home – which also has a positive impact on efficiency through time saved travelling, and a positive impact on the environment.
After this phase, the next layer is analysing the content using machine learning and AI in order to compare multiple surgeries of the same type, so we can better deduce the elements that are impacting the success or failure of certain procedures – and thereby identify areas for improvement. We’ll be able to say that surgeons performing a certain procedure with 10 steps are more successful than those performing it with 9 steps, for example, then analyse and isolate that additional step in order to share the relevant information and footage with other surgeons who are liable to be performing such a procedure. This way, the analysis of content can become a means of not just identifying the techniques that constitute best practice, but actively promoting those techniques to surgeons whose performance it could improve.
Ultimately, it’s the patients who will benefit most from surgeons’ use of and engagement with the Proximie platform. Every decision and innovation we make is geared towards making Proximie the best possible platform on which surgeons can collaborate, share knowledge and continue learning – with the ultimate goal of maximising access to healthcare and improving surgical performance worldwide.
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