8:00 AM, just got out of the shower, my phone rings. Our family doctor calling : “Morning Lucien, just when I started my computer it pointed me out to Patients data. I can see some irregularity in your EKG of last night. Combined with you gaining some weight over the last weeks and your changing blood-pressure I would like to suggest you to come in to my office today or tomorrow.”
In a decade from now, this will be become completely normal; to send your own generated data to the doctors office. Current systems like Electronic Medical Records, or EMR, will be adapted to receive data collected from a ton of devices like step-counters, weighing scales and apps though a Personal Health Record, PHR. By counting the steps through an app or small device, 24/7 monitoring my EKG and my weight with devices in total under $300 I’m able to keep track of myself and share the data with my GP.
The prices of smart (medical) devices are declining very fast and the possibilities are growing exponentially. I believe this development will continue in the upcoming years.
Healthcare has to adapt to these kind of changes. Sometimes it’s technology that pushes it, but nowadays also expectations of patients are pushing the needle heavily.
In history there are many examples of industries neglecting these kinds of signals and becaming disrupted. How do we get the paradigm shift to another without having to face battlefields first like those that happened in music, travel and publishing industry? Harvard professor Clayton Christensen has beautifully described how the “establishment” too often, too long, did too little to engage in the ‘new world’ with dramatic consequences.
Although I consider myself a technology optimist, I am critical, especially about the time factor that is being overrated time and time again. The impact however is on the other hand underrated and it will touch everything in healthcare. Every single time after being at faculty at FutureMed during the “big pond-crossing” back to the Netherlands I get this great “how-to-feeling.” On engaging effective with my 11.000 colleagues at Radboudumc to cope with it, my strong belief is that technology is no longer the bottleneck, but man is.
We all know that healthcare must turn into a partnership between professionals and patients (and their families). But I think we also need to focus on what is possible and necessary in ten to fifteen years and thus get started now. Actually if we want to solve tomorrow’s problems we should’ve started 6 years ago. Finance, ethics, real estate, demographics: all aspects of healthcare will be touched by the changes that will come out of the current shift.
Because let’s face it: if we change the curriculum for our medical students now – which incidentally we are already doing – it still takes seven years for those students to graduate. It will cost them another seven years before they have any mandate or senior policy role in a care facility. Real lasting changes need time, there is no quick fix.
Exponential change requires an unorthodox approach. Perhaps we’d better skip the implementation for the current generation of innovation leaders and focus on the next generation. Then we keep the ‘seated crew’ through in-service training as up to date as possible. We need to get to the forefront of the problem, not sticking band-aids to the back of it like the ones we are patching right now.
It all starts with the first step. For that there is a great opportunity at our doorstep in starting to open up for the data that experts can bring us. Have them bring their own data in 2014.
Experts in HAVING their disease, are often called patients. Source
