Health 2.0 keynote recap – #health2con

I’m excited to be attending my first Health 2.0 conference today to learn more about the trends in healthcare innovation and meet the hackers, entrepreneurs, industry and government leaders who are driving disruptive change in the healthcare industry. As a User Experience designer, I’m pleased to see such a focus on patient-centered thinking. Here’s a quick recap and interpretation of the presentations I saw this morning.

The first session was a “dueling keynote,” two short presentations by two interesting speakers

• author, health futurist, and healthcare industry advisor, Jeff Goldsmith.
• publisher, Web 2.0 pundit, and “alpha geek” watcher, Tim O’Reilly

Goldsmith started off by talking about what he called the “Innovation Drop” across every sector of the healthcare industry, from medical devices and imaging technology to enterprise and clinical IT to healthcare delivery. In one example statistic, Pharma R&D spending has tripled while new drug introductions have dropped by 2/3 over the past few years.

After establishing his point about stagnation in the industry, he moved on to talk about the Boomer generation and the increased demand they will bring as they age and require more from the healthcare system. He illustrated he point by comparing the receding waters before a tsunami to the coming en masse retirement of Boomer healthcare practitioners. The tsunami’s wave, in his metaphor, will hit when that same population places unprecedented demand on a diminished healthcare system.

Goldsmith ended by stating that the industry needs to rethink its approach to innovation to increase the productivity of the healthcare system. He offered five calls to action.

• Tame the documentation problem in healthcare delivery
• Help both HCPs and patients find information effortlessly when and where they need it
• Accommodate the increasing diversity of HCP and patient needs and styles
• Equip patients and families with tools to better manage their own health
• Entertain and honor the patient

O’Reilly then launched into a talk on how disruptive innovation from outside the traditional healthcare industry is coming to change the way the healthcare system works. He characterized the trend of Web 2.0 companies as those who were able to weather the doc com bust by being the best in their industries at harvesting collective intelligence. To this he added the components that have come to characterize Web 2.0, a focus on cloud computing, data-driven applications, mobile interfaces, real-time information and pushing the Internet beyond the browser and into everyday objects and interactions.

He used the example of the media industry as a bellwether for what is coming in healthcare, adding the point that many currently successful companies will be usurped by new entrants and many will fail before reliable new business models are established. He offered a vision for the future in three specific technological trends: the introduction of tablet computing to the point of care, cloud-based services to unify and manage patient data, and the emergence of sensor platforms like smartphones and other connected devices to reduce the burden of patient-contributed information.

Finally, O’Reilly ended by telling the audience that to truly capitalize on the principles of Web 2.0 innovators should seek to harness the collective intelligence emerging from the introduction of new technologies and make smart use of the “information shadows” that result from our everyday actions.

In the Q&A that followed the keynotes, Goldsmith and O’Reilly outlined two fundamental challenges to idling the infrastructure on which a new healthcare system could be based:

• harnessing medical data and getting it to the HCPs and patients when and where they need it
• simplifying the transactional complexity of the existing payment system in healthcare and moving from a “pay for procedure” model to a “pay for outcomes” one.

Apple is the anti-Parc

For those who don’t know, Xerox Parc was Xerox’s formidible R&D center. Until 2002, when it was spun off, Parc did the basic research that created such ubiquitous technological innovations as bitmap graphics, GUI (featuring windows and icons), WYSIWYG editing, ethernet, InterPress (a pre PostScript resolution-independent graphical page-description language) and laser printing. The problem at Parc wasn’t developing viable technological innovations… it was monetizing them.

Apple, on the other hand, is all about monetizing technological innovations, just not their own… and they always have been. 25 years ago Apple released the first Macintosh, and became one of the firms to gain commercial success with a Xerox Parc innovation, the GUI interface. Apple still doesn’t have any significant muscle in basic R&D. What they do have is significant power in design, marketing, and business and the ability to make all the right connections to synthesize the right thing for the market at the right time.

Apple’s super power, I would argue, is introducing new technology to us in easily adoptable pieces–not first but best. Is this the ideal mix for a modern consumer electronics company? Seemingly, so.

5 years ago, who would have imagined that we would now make daily use of accelerometers and magnetometers, or orientation, light, and proximity sensors? It took years of many other companies trying and failing to get interaction with these technologies right, and although Apple continue to claim “no user research,” the world has been their testbed, and observations of how people have used (and not used) these technologies have clearly influenced their design.

Apple is adept at packaging technology in adoptable products that consumers not only understand, but desire. This is their true key to success. I’m looking forward to what comes next…

References

Apple Buys Swedish Facial Recognition Company Polar Rose

Creativity Is Just Connecting Things