Healthcare Technology and the Role of the Physician
What matters when considering physician adoption of healthcare technology and mobile health platforms is transforming rapidly— but frequently without physician input.
Healthcare technology and the role of physician influencers
There has never been a greater need to identify, and engage the savvy physician who understands the role of healthcare technology and mobile health and the enormous implications in fostering and guaranteeing physician relevance. Technology is not about replacing physicians. We must use these tumultuous times to to scale great physician thought leaders!
Healthcare technology has become a very complex, fragmented space. There are desktop-based programs, cloud-based platforms, mobile applications which are physician-centric, and mobile applications which are patient-centered. There are platforms to document an encounter, platforms to educate patients, and applications to improve communications. Educational applications can be video or text-based. The content can be purchased or produced by the physician. Video platforms are evolving to educate patients and to enable patients to message physicians.
There is a clear message here!
Effective healthcare IT organizations cannot focus exclusively on technology alone. As HIT companies mature and innovate the organizational needs to effectively manage these systems and their integrations increases as well
Yikes… Even if you are a healthcare technology junkie like me, the plethora of apps that are released on a weekly basis can be staggering. Inevitably, even tech savvy physicians can quickly lose interest due to analysis paralysis or an incomplete understanding of the value proposition or role of a given technology in their particular practice.
Healthcare Technology has come of age
There has never been a more important time in medicine to recognize what matters!
Determining what matters is not always obvious, and it changes. It changes by consumer and physician demands, government regulations, service line enhancements, supply chain management, and engaged C-suites with skin in the game. We clearly need top down driven innovative initiatives with regards to technology adoption that improve patients’ access to information, quality content, care plans, etc.
Healthcare Technology and the Relevance of the Physician
As Bryan Vartabedian astutely pointed out… the role of the physician in medicine and healthcare is going to evolve. That evolution is going to have to occur rapidly given the addition of 33+million newly insured that are going to seek care through a system that cannot handle the current demand, cannot control cost, and has poor abilities at best to measure quality. Even without the additional burden of the insured patient pool, with ever increasing pressures to improve the quality of care and the yet to be released (patient centric) MU 3 criteria, it is imperative that physicians begin to pay far more attention to the impact that healthcare technology can have on every aspect of their professional presence and, in turn, provide their insights on what really matters.
This is the time, this is the place… healthcare technology platform developers need to deeply embed physicians, workflow solutions comfortable to providers and utilize their experience to implement and scale relevant, comforting, UI/UX focused, game-changing technology platforms that have the ability to transform the HIT portion of our healthcare system’s troubles. It is time to scale great physician thought leaders who are able to recognize needs and value propositions, and are capable of perfecting or innovating upon the things that matter… ignoring the noise.
[...] What matters when considering physician adoption of healthcare technology and mHealth is transforming rapidly— but without physician input. [...]