What Can Happen If You Don’t Plan Ahead Before Launching A New Product

Problem

I work for a health management company and I was hired to build a web portal for the clients to login to look at and manage reports. The reports contain information about the health conditions of a set population and ways to improve the weak areas to keep them healthy. When most product managers are getting ready to launch a new product, they brainstorm at the start of the project and think about the things that are most likely to go wrong when it is first launched so they can avoid them. We were getting ready to launch the portal to our first group of clients so they could start using it and give us feedback and I made the observation that the leaking of personal health information was the number one thing we had to worry about. If a leak or breach occurred, our name would appear above the fold on the front page of the WSJ and New York Times.

Actions taken

Because of the concern of leaking sensitive medical information, my company had data safety and compliance teams in place to provide engineering standards and to review development plans and functional requirements and sign off on completed products to ensure that HIPAA violations do not occur.

Lessons learned

The biggest takeaway is that these are things that you need to start thinking about early on at the beginning of the project. Since the company I work for is highly regulated, they have data safety officers and compliance offers that are there for that very reason. It is important to utilize them and have them review your project to make sure you are following all regulatory and compliance guidelines prior to initial launch. It is important to bring in people who are experienced in data safety and compliance early on in your product's life cycle in order to ensure that breaches of sensitive medical and financial data do not occur.