There was a lot of hoopla out in San Francisco this week. And no, I’m not talking about the highly covered TechCrunch 40. Rather, I’m speaking about Health 2.0, a conference put together by the good folks over at The Health Care Blog.
However, despite a lot of fist pumping and chatter reminiscent of late 1999, there were voices of reason in the crowd asking hard questions which are applicable to all technology endeavors: is this technology creating something that is useful, and that people will actually use.
Perhaps the strongest voice for this line of thinking was David Brailer, MD, the former National Health Information Technology Coordinator. Quoting from the Healthcare IT Blog:
… “the behaviors and relationships that Health 2.0 seeks to enable need to be created,” Brailer said. How patients will relate to other patients, how they will relate to providers” have largely to be redefined” before the technological capabilities are adopted.
On other words, there’s a lot of great technology out there that can create a lot of solutions, but at the moment it’s not necessarily solving people’s day-to-day problems, nor meeting them at a point where they would use it.
A simple example of this is online patient scheduling. Yes, perhaps one day people will schedule their appointments with doctors online, but at the moment it is not a behavior that people are accustomed to, nor has any corollary in other industries. For example, if you need to make a reservation at a restaurant, despite the plethora of online reservation systems, people often still just pick up the phone. Hearing a voice brings trust and assurance, while online scheduling is still impersonal and not yet quite trusted.
In other news …
Away from the conference, though, there was even more compelling news about the future of medicine right here in Brooklyn. Those of you who are hip enough, and lucky enough to be under 40, can get the services of Dr. Jay Parkinson, who runs his practice only using an iPhone and a laptop.
I’ll be performing your surgery with my iPhone
As always, thanks for listening.
~alex
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Did you hear that one of Dr. Parkinson’s patients text messaged him complaining of severe abdominal pain? After a flurry of text messages, the doctor prescribed Prilosec. The next day, the patient was found dead…he had a handful of Prilosec and an untreated gunshot wound to the belly. Just kidding. :)