The Implementer ’ s Dilemma

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD
One word: implementation.
Increasingly, I’m convinced that the underappreciated challenges of implementation describe the ever-expanding gap between the promise of emerging technologies (sensors, AI) and their comparatively limited use in clinical care and pharmaceutical research. (Updated disclosure: I am now a VC, associated with a pharma company; views expressed, as always, are my own.)
Technology Promises Disruption Of Healthcare…
Let’s start with some context. Healthcare, it is universally agreed, is “broken,” and in particular, many of the advances and conveniences we now take for granted in virtually every other domain remain largely aspirational goals, or occasionally pilot initiatives, in medicine.
Healthcare is viewed by many as an ossified enterprise desperately in need of some disruption. As emerging technologies shook up other industries originally viewed as too hide-bound to ever change, there was in many quarters a profound hope that advances like the smart phone or AI, and approaches like agile development and design thinking, could reinvent the way care is delivered, and more generally, help to reconceptualize the way each of us think about health and disease.

In particular, these technologies offered the promise of helping improve care in at least five ways:

From reactive to anticipatory
From episodic to continuous
From a focus on the average patient to a focus on each individual patient
From care based on precedent (pre...

Source: The Health Care Blog - December 12, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Daimler Benz AG David Shaywitz Innovation Source Type: blogs