When Eric Dishman, Fellow and General Manager of Health & Life Sciences at Intel discussed the popular perception that hospitals will become obsolete, he got my attention. He also reminded me of one of the keynote speakers from last year’s Summit, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who talked about healthcare without doctors. This excerpt from my blog about the Summit last year describes Khosla’s argument.
In Tuesday’s Super Session at the Summit, “Pushing the Limits of Mobile Health – Can we Have Health and Healthcare Without Doctors”, Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, challenged the notion that humans are best suited to deliver healthcare. He discussed the difficulties providers face when trying to recall 10,000 diseases and syndromes and 1,100 lab tests. He discussed their cognitive biases when making decisions and their tendency to avoid the naïve questions that are necessary to provide objective care. These very human limitations can lead to misdiagnoses, which he said could be a bigger killer than either car accidents or breast cancer. Due to these limitations, he argued computers would do a better job as decision makers in the context of integrative medicine. Computers, he said, “can be care maximizers and cost minimizers”. His view that comprehensive mHealth might be adopted in the developing world before it’s adopted in the developed (since the need is more urgent), also caught my attention.
Dishman’s argument similarly revolved around information management but incorporated the use of an individual’s continuous, real time data. During his presentation he wore a wireless monitoring device on his wrist. Longitudinal and unobtrusive data collection was also the theme of the research session, “Using New Technologies and Modeling Techniques to Understand Health Behavior, Behavior Change, and Maintenance: Findings from an International Workshop". It was a big title for big ideas. Ilkka Korhonen, Professor at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland, said wearable monitors that can discriminates between stress and recovery can helps deliver real time health reminders, such as when someone might be about to eat something unhealthy. The panelists said that while understanding what influences behavior is difficult, wearable monitors and will help researchers fill the gaps in recording human behavior that piecemeal data collection cannot.
But as Dishman said, tech innovation, is not enough, cultural innovation is need too. Adoption of wearable technology is dependent on the ability of those who provide care and the systems in which they work to evolve. Dishman and Kholsa are both looking far into the future and suggesting that in order to evolve, healthcare orthodoxy needs to be challenged.
Although what we do at K4Health is removed from curative health, the tactics we use to address health system problems originating from too much, or not enough information, are similar. We use knowledge management principles in a systematic way to help us identify, capture, share, apply, and create knowledge.
K4Health's Bangladesh Knowledge Management Initiative (BKMI) manages a pilot project that aims to normalize the use of eToolkits by community-based fieldworkers for the purpose aiding client-based counseling and supplementing knowledge in the areas of MNCH, family planning, and nutrition. Can you imagine a healthcare system that relegates doctors and hospitals to the periphery while computers and mobile devices use data to diagnose our problems, monitor our recovery and remind us to change our habits?