Is it the last question I hope? Or there are more? Hi, my name is Niren Kocha. I'm the Senior Director of Product Management in Healthcare North America for Publicist Sapient. Healthcare is not sexy, but it's a great place to be. And if you're looking to build a career in healthcare and want to know what product management in healthcare means and want to be part of a trillion dollar industry, you got to watch this.
That's actually a brilliant question. So healthcare, unlike other industries, is very personal. Health is personal. It's very private. Those experiences need to be built in that way. It has to have some emotions. And I think no one has cracked that code. Everyone's trying to be the best health engagement app or the best insurer or the best provider system. But there's a long way. And I think that's what makes healthcare so interesting is there's so much to do. And that's what makes product management in healthcare both challenging and great at the same time. And that's why it's different from other industries.
The next question that people ask me in Quota in Healthcare, and this is something to do with just privacy in general, which is around why do I always get asked my date of birth, whether it's the context of a hospital, whether you go to pharmacy, do a pickup. The best way to tell someone's identity is something I know, something I am, something I can tell you. That's the three ways you kind of identify yourself. So think of it, one of these being something I know is my date of birth or last photo of your SSN. They are basically indicators to make sure that secret information to you. It's a security check.
Sheryl Reynolds on Quora asked this question, are consumer facing apps the Trojan horse needed to bring product management into healthcare? Healthcare needs to learn a lot from other industries, whether it's the travel industry or it is consumer industry. Everyone has created this level of trust. You know, you're always comfortable shopping from Amazon. Why? Because you know the price, you know what you're getting because you see reviews of people and you know the quality of the stuff you're buying. When you think about this in a healthcare world, imagine going to a physician. You don't get any of these things. You're unsure about the price, how much it's going to cost you. You don't know the quality of the physician because there's no rating available. So it causes a lot of confusion. So yes, so consumer facing apps have exploded in healthcare in the last two years. COVID has partly been responsible and I say this and I'll say this statement again that nothing ignites the spirit of innovation like the pandemic. You have all these billion dollar startups that are starting up, billions of dollars being put in. And the reason is all of these are companies who are trying to change the healthcare ecosystem. And that's what will change the healthcare ecosystem in its entirety.
So some of the other questions that I've heard from people is, is telemedicine safe? Typically, you would consider telemedicine to be safe because that is done through a very secure gateway. Typically, most physicians today use some solution that's completely secured where no one's listening as long as you're doing it with a trusted physician and not like just picking up the phone and discussing health.
So one of the questions I get often asked is what is the future of product management in healthcare? Now, if I were to just look at pure data and look at the amount of investment that have been put in healthcare, that's huge. Billions of dollars have been put to transform healthcare. Now to transform healthcare, you do need product managers to build consumer experiences around members, patients, all of it, right? The whole ecosystem. So we need to keep that in context. And given that this industry is nowhere near some of the experiences people experience with Amazon, Netflix, there's a huge chasm to kind of pass. So I think the future is amazing in product management. And I think if you're looking for a career in health, this is the exact time to be there.