Our Psychic Disintegration in Healthcare
U.S. National Health IT Week begins TODAY and I’m pumped at the prospect of helping “spread awareness of the value of health IT” in supporting “healthcare transformation.” My digital surfboard is primed to ride the multi-dimensional flow of eternal sunshine and technology’s transcendent promise that will emanate from the four-day event (October 8–12) in our nation’s capital.
They have a blog where champions of information technology from across the industry are uniting to share their voices on how health IT is catalyzing change in U.S. healthcare. Ron Ritchey, MD, chief medical officer, eQHealth Solutions, posted his view on Health Information Technology and Business Intelligence Possess the Power to Transform an Entire Population’s Health:
Reflecting on National Health IT Week has made me think of how far the industry has come in the effective use of health data and technology to reshape the way we deliver care to patients. The explosion of innovation and growth over the last 35 years, since I began my practice, has been miraculous to see and be a part of. In fact, I was reminiscing not so long ago — the capabilities we now have at our fingertips would have been thought to be out of a futuristic cartoon, and today, they are commonplace.
We are living in an inspiring time, or interesting one, depending on your perspective. Technological progress today feels something like a supernatural force, something in the ether that generates its own prodigious enthusiasm and unbounded opportunities.
“We have entered an epoch of invention and progress unique in the history of the world…a gigantic tidal wave of human ingenuity and resource, so stupendous in its magnitude, so complex in its diversity, so profound in its thought, so fruitful in its wealth, so beneficent in its results, that the mind is strained and embarrassed in its effort to expand to a full appreciation of it.”
So wrote Edward Byrn in a Scientific American article….in 1896. He was describing the progress of invention and innovation in the United States during the previous 50 years, marking a period of time (1866–1896) where tens of thousands of Americans were inventing at the grass-roots level and creating a whole new culture of independent and disruptive entrepreneurs.
Before the app, before the smartphone, before the networks, before the $7 billion in digital health investments and StartUp Health Investing in Companies Focused on Achieving Health Moonshots, there was already a deeply modern technological society filled with entrepreneurs trained as engineers, managers and financiers. The difference between the nature of innovation in 1896 and the nature of innovation in 2018 is focus and funding direction: Edison understood the system must be first; today we invest in component parts.
“We’re taking on the challenge to reimagine medicine with data and digital,” said Bertrand Bodson, chief digital officer of Novartis, in the news release announcing StartUp raising $31M from Novartis, Ping An Group, Chiesi Group, GuideWell and Otsuka. “Our partnership with StartUp Health is an exciting opportunity to accelerate our collaboration with the tech ecosystem and together create scalable digital solutions to real healthcare challenges.”
A Time of Innovation Stagnation
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert C. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog, Marginal Revolution, and writes frequently for the New York Times.
Cowen argues our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau.
In other words, all the recent techno-enthusiasm aside, the fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. Harvard Business Review editor Justin Fox also says innovation isn’t what it used to be:
“Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century, the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.”
In layman’s terms a millennial would understand: If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?
Online, Offline and the Line Between
We are now in the fiftieth year of the official US health care “crisis.”
For more than half a century, ballooning health care costs have been a source of concern, confusion, complexity and impending catastrophe to the American economy and employer operating margins when, on July 10, 1969, President Richard Nixon, proclaimed, “We face a massive crisis in this area.” Without prompt administrative and legislative action, he added at a special press briefing, “we will have a breakdown in our medical care system.”
“Everyone seems to agree that the existing system — or lack of system — has rather marked shortcomings,” complained John Gardner, Health Education & Welfare Secretary, back in 1967 during a speech at the Society of Actuaries. “But there is not yet any agreement as to what a more perfect system will look like.”
In the spirit of breaking out of the mind rubble, let me float a new theory why.
The problem is psychic disintegration. Words such as “value,” “transformation,” “healthcare,” “connectivity,” “digital,” and “patient” are blocking us from thinking new thoughts. The words are meaningless, especially when it comes to producing new ideas, creating strategic differentiation or designing capabilities competitors can’t easily duplicate (or haven’t thought about because they’re focused on being “patient centric”).
More pieces and parts. Healthcare is funneling its creativity and resources into fragmented “solutions” areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. We are not innovating at a system level.
Strategy and positioning for sustainability is all about designing and managing new context. Think of it this way: executing an algorithm with a physical system is like putting a mind into a body; executing AI alone is just a cool tech pilot.
The rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest for entrepreneurs and innovators who understand the difference.
Free your mind, your ass will follow.
/ jgs
