Healthcare’s Digital Accessibility Problem | Ro’s Plum Ertz

**Plum Ertz** (0:00)
I love Ro because we put the patient at the forefront. Everything we do and everything that we're working on is built around how is this solving a patient problem? Like if anyone said anything about the blockchain, I would straight up walk out of the building.
I have told every person at the company, like you say blockchain, I'm out. Like that's not what we're here for. We're not here for the AI, the technical innovation for the sake of technical innovation. We're here at technical innovation for the sake of how can we make patients lives better? How can we make it easier?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
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Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. We are live in New York and we've got Plum Ertz with us. Plum, welcome to the show.

**Plum Ertz** (1:15)
Howdy, thank you so much for having me today.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:16)
I mean, anyone who comes on the show with sparkly red heels is absolutely a hit in my book.

**Plum Ertz** (1:23)
This casual Tuesday shoe.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:25)
I like it. And you're the Director of Software Engineering at Ro, which is a direct telemedicine startup. Would love to dive in on a topic I know you're very passionate about, which is accessibility. And I know it's for the work you're doing here.

**Plum Ertz** (1:37)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so many different ways to define accessibility when you think of healthcare and telemedicine.
I'm based in New Jersey, New York, whatever you want to say. And I can find a doctor. There's a million doctors, a million specialists. For a lot of folks, you don't have that opportunity, even the United States.
It's not a choice of, oh, do I go online or do I go to a doctor? It's do I get health care or not? So putting health care on the internet is how we make that happen.
And it's not just enough to put health care on the internet. And that's where digital accessibility comes in. Just because something is online on a website doesn't mean you can access to it because you really have to build it in a way where folks, regardless of what technology they're using, what network they're using, what ability or disability they may have, they're able to use that. And that's not the responsibility of the person to try to figure out the Konami code to use your website. That's the responsibility of the people building these sites, building these experiences to make it accessible. And sometimes that really gets lost in the build, especially, weirdly enough, in health care. I don't know if you've ever gone on your insurance website or any digital website. You probably had some of the less good experiences in those spaces because so much attention is just brought to the functions of getting the insurance and the form fields and everything and not enough on just making it usable.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:52)
Does the website work? Can users effectively navigate to find the care they need? Just an example from my personal life, when I was trying to switch my primary care physician, I couldn't figure out how to do it online. I looked up the documentation like, oh, here's how you do it. Didn't work. I don't know if it was just because I was on Google Chrome or what it was. I had to call in and say, hey, I really want to switch my PCP. How do I, can I do that? And they switched it for me. But this is a process that should be easy online at least was presented as easy.
And I am a fairly able-bodied, despite if anyone watching, I currently have a cast on my arm, but normally able-bodied person, the challenges for others who maybe have further accessibility issues, I know can go deeper. And it seems like not just in healthcare, but broadly in software engineering, we often optimize for just like, oh, you know, we're getting 80% of people, 90% of people.
And the edge cases really get ignored.

**Plum Ertz** (3:47)
Yeah, cause it's, and I mean, even you're, you're the perfect example right now, cause it's 80 or 90% of people because folks are thinking about permanent disability. They're thinking about, oh, well, we can't get the blind people or the deaf people or whatever have you. But the problem is disability is a spectrum.