When I first stepped into the Sidebench offices, my first thought was: it would be cool to work here if they did healthcare. Unbeknownst to me at the time of course, Kevin had already set a vision for Sidebench’s future, and healthcare was a central part of that. A few months later, I ended up joining as their Digital Health Strategist. What drew me to work for Sidebench was that they transitioned quite successfully from working outside of the healthcare industry to being fully embedded in it. And after working for years from within the healthcare industry, I saw signs that told me I should begin paying attention to what was going on in the healthcare technology world.
The first is the slow but steady way that all stakeholders — insurers, providers, vendors, and patients — have begun to organize themselves around the new reality of a digital world. This optimism may seem at first contradictory to reports that electronic medical records, despite their ubiquity, have failed to live up to their promise of increased efficiency and better outcomes. But let me challenge the notion that technology has failed to live up to our expectations.
A 2016 Vox article detailed the findings of economist Chad Syverson, which drew parallels between the productivity bursts that industries experienced at the advent of electricity, and the productivity gains seen in the information technology era. Syverson made the point that there was actually more than one inflection point, or period of dramatic growth, in industrial productivity when electricity was introduced because it took managers and workers time to recreate their workflows around electricity’s potential.
In The Second Machine Age, MIT researchers Brynjolfsson and McAffee write of this phenomenon in the information age: “For every dollar of investment in computer hardware, companies need to invest up to another nine dollars in software, training, and business process redesign.” The key takeaway here is that organizations are made of human beings, and throwing technology at problems without thinking deeply and critically about how people and processes must be reorganized won’t give us optimal return on investment. To truly reap the benefits, reach the next inflection point, and reap the 10x return that we want, we have to completely reimagine how we design our organizations, including our hospitals, to interact with technology. It also requires a change in the way we as consumers interact with our health.
Here’s the thing though: the inflection point may be closer than we think in healthcare. We are now 10 years into the mobile era, and about 9 years into widespread EHR adoption after the HITECH act. The healthcare industry has now had a decade under its belt to learn the hard lessons and make the important mistakes. Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report reflected some extremely telling signs about the way healthcare organizations are beginning to use technology. EHR adoption is approaching 90%, and 95% of non-federal acute hospitals are allowing patients to view their data digitally.
The second important trend to note is the change in consumer behavior and expectations. There is massive adoption of health and fitness apps — over 1.2 Billion downloads in 2016. Millennials, who are now reaching adulthood, are increasingly engaging adopting digital health solutions. The only place where millennials aren’t leading the charge? Adoption of telemedicine (called ‘remote care’ in Meeker’s report) — It’s Baby Boomers who are paving the way there. Finally, massive sources of data in healthcare are now collected digitally — not only through EHRs, but through connected health devices and mobile apps. With that data comes the potential to create unique insights into how we care for patients, and how to help patients care for themselves.
So what does the healthcare organization of the future look like? That it should leverage technology is a given — the far more important thing is that it must be able to iterate upon itself to improve processes and try new ways to incorporate that technology. In healthcare, risk of harm must be balanced with the need to experiment, and ultimately patient safety and information security have to be high priorities. But those on the frontlines of care already know that patients suffer as much from the inertia of inaction or the acceptance of bad systemic processes as they do from the mistakes of their doctors. The healthcare organization of the future must also partner with and learn from the best in the technology business. The silos that keep healthcare from interfacing with other more consumer-facing industries must be broken down.
Finally, navigating the inflection point of the digital health age will require visionary leadership from inside and outside the industry. It will require women and men who understand that technology must be matched with organizational redesign and are willing to unflinchingly shoulder the burden of leading their people forward into this new age. The inflection point in digital health is coming — and if we can commit ourselves to challenging the status quo and taking action, then we all have a chance to be a part of it.
— Ben Nguyen, Digital Health Strategist
Ben is a medical student at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, where in addition to medicine, he studied medical device development, product design, and business strategy at Marshall and Viterbi as part of the HTE@USC program. Prior to joining Sidebench, Ben worked at the USC Center for Body Computing, a digital health research division and think tank, where his projects involved everything from virtual human avatars to mobile chronic disease management to biometric sensors. Follow him on Twitter: @BDKnguyen.
