It’s no surprise that digital health startups are often staffed with tech experts who have the savvy to build out complex IT infrastructure. But in many cases, the end-users – in this case, the medical providers and doctors who will ultimately use these technologies – are left out of the process. And that needs to change if we’re truly going to realize the potential of the digital health revolution, according to anesthesiologist and tenured Northwestern University professor Dr. M. Christine Stock.

Stock is out with an op-ed in Venture Beat which she dubs an “open letter health tech startups.” In it, she lists the ongoing hurdles to effectively folding groundbreaking tech into the medical sector, including a lack of physician input during the development phase.

“While many new technologies work well after the period of adaptation, leaving end-users (physicians) out of the product development process leads to unanticipated problems such as unintuitive and frustrating workflow, taxing documentation requirements, and nonsensical and inaccurate cut-and-paste progress notes,” she writes.