The future of healthcare – iPhones, teams, the genome and big data?
Want to know about the future of healthcare? Then watch this:
Click here to view an amazing TED lecture. Don’t let the fact that the speaker, Eric Dishman, is general manager for health at Intel put you off! He ties together how remote diagnostic devices, medical teams, big data and genome sequencing might together reinvent medicine. The strength of the short presentation is in its breadth, and the fact that it is rooted in his personal experience. And it is a bit of tear jerker at the end!
To me, the question isn’t whether these changes will happen, but when? That, of course, is hard to answer. Back in the late nineties, in another life, I spent a lot of time arguing that the web was unlikely to change buying behaviour over a short timespan. How wrong I was!
The difference is that downloading music and software or buying things on the web developed in a free market, where opponents – record companies, bricks and mortar retail and so on – were relatively weak, incapable of stopping consumer-led change.
Because of the medical profession, healthcare – public and private – is different. It is rather like suggesting to the well-paid workers of a heavily-unionised factory that, although they face no direct competition, they should introduce massive change and automate everything. In this case, you’re asking this of the most powerful and respected profession in the world.
Worse still: when it comes to healthcare people don’t see themselves as active consumers, but as passive patients. How can you have consumer-led change without consumers?
I suspect that companies like Intel will have to build their own factories. In other words, they will need to actually develop vertically-integrated models that employ doctors and deliver services in order to make their point. Sure, such companies are already sponsoring some hospitals, but that needs to be taken to the next level if they are to break the log-jam. And you can imagine the resistance to any large scale project that poses any threat to existing provision.
The big opportunity for private sector providers of all types, as they move away from passive hotelier models, is to also set up and build such factories. But, again, this will cause waves.
So change will (probably) still take one or two decades. Let’s hope I am wrong again!
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Max Hotopf or call 0207 183 3779.
