We ’ re Disrupting Disruption

By KIM BELLARD The Sunday Times featured an op-ed by Mark Britnell, a professor at the UCL Global Business School for Health, with the headline Our creaking NHS can’t beat its admin chaos without a tech revolution. Substitute “U.S. healthcare system” for “NHS” and the headline still would work, as would most of the content.    I wouldn’t hold my breath about that tech revolution. In fact, if you’re waiting for disruptive innovation in healthcare, or more generally, you may be in for a long wait. A new study in Nature argues that science is becoming less disruptive. That seems counterintuitive; it often feels like we’re living in a golden age of scientific discoveries and technological innovations. But the authors are firm in their finding: “we report a marked decline in disruptive science and technology over time.”  The authors looked at data from 45 million scientific papers and 3.9 million patents, going back six decades. Their primary method of analysis is something called a CD Index, which looks at how papers influence subsequent citations. Essentially, the more disruptive, the more the paper itself is cited, rather than previous work.        The results are surprising, and disturbing. “Across fields, we find that science and technology are becoming less disruptive,” the authors found, “…relative to earlier eras, recent papers and patents do less to push science and technology in new dir...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Tech disruptive innovation Kim Bellard Science Source Type: blogs