Jan 16, 2014

The Virginia Mason Experience

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Prospering by Standardizing Processes and Improving the Patient Experience by Andis Robeznieks, Modern Healthcare.

Dr. Gary Kaplan, chairman and CEO of the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle Washington was recently interviewed about his experience of integrating Lean manufacturing process improvement at VMMC. Paul Plsek, a management consultant, has also written a new book about that experience: Accelerating Health Care Transformation with Lean and Innovation: The Virginia Mason Experience.

Below are a few excerpts from the interview:

On Organizational Change Management
Change is very, very hard in healthcare. We have learned a lot about change management. Not everybody wanted to come along. There were perhaps 10% who were early adopters, 10% who were very resistant to any kind of change and probably 80% of the people—and I’m talking about physicians, nurses and others—in the middle, just sort of saying we’ll see what happens and this too will pass.

I think we surprised people with our perseverance. Today, we’re possibly the furthest along of anybody in healthcare who’s consciously deployed a management method for more than a decade. But the most significant accomplishment is understanding that the pathway to improving quality and safety is the same pathway to lowering cost, and that involves relentlessly taking waste and unnecessary variability out of our processes. This creates a much higher quality, better patient experience.

It creates an opportunity for people to be empowered to use their best thinking to redesign their work. Our staff, who are closest to the work, are the ones who redesigned the work and in so doing reduced the burden of work.

On Physician Resistance
Traditionally, physician autonomy has been thought to be the sine qua non of professionalism, and that only we know what’s in the best interests of our patients. At Virginia Mason, we’ve been able to move from that approach and we understand that healthcare is impeded, not facilitated, by the notion of physician autonomy. Our physicians are actively engaged in supply-chain initiatives that standardize prostheses. One of our early rapid-cycle improvement events in 2001 was standardizing laparoscopic cholecystectomy trays, enabling us to save $700-$800 for every case by getting all the surgeons to realize that customized setups were unnecessary. We found is that if we eliminated nonvalue-added variation, the result is we create time for the value-added variation that differentiates individual physicians from each other and for patient preferences.

On Measurable Improvement
One of the things I’m most proud of is we’re the only hospital in the U.S. to be named by Leapfrog a top hospital in every year that designation has been given. We reduced cumulative nurse walking distance in the hospital by 750 miles per day, which freed up more than 250 hours of time for direct patient care.

On Measuring Outcomes
Outcomes measures have eluded us in healthcare for a long time. We’re getting better, but it’s a challenge. The entire continuum of care is a challenge to measure, given that we have patients coming in for care from Alaska, Montana and across Washington state, and Walmart and the Pacific Business Group on Health send patients here for heart and spine and total joint care. So it becomes quite difficult at times to measure the entire continuum of care.
One of the interesting things we’ve learned is that standardizing processes is really important even when there is no incontrovertible double-blinded study evidence. The standardization in itself allows us to measure and then it allows us to eliminate defect-prone situations. If a team of people do things nine different ways, that creates opportunities for defects to occur, and that’s what we want to eliminate.

On the Impact of Healthcare Reform
We welcome the changes that are here and are coming. More transparency is critical, and it plays right to our sweet spot. If we are able to improve quality and safety and lower costs, that’s going to allow us to succeed in a marketplace that’s more driven by value than volume. We see reform as a catalyst to accelerate our work, and it’s going to help move the entire industry in ways that will improve quality and lower cost.

Policy Issue
VMMC’s process improvement initiative was launched before and thus independent of the influences of the Affordable Care Act. But of course it was not launched in a free market vacuum independent of industry regulatory influences. Dr. Kaplan welcomes the future impact of healthcare reform as an inducement – or at least catalyst – for change at healthcare organizations that don’t have the predisposed wherewith all to affect the kinds of change accomplished at VMMC.

Others are going to disagree. They will argue that innovation and performance improvement flourish best when individuals’ inherent incentives to act in their best interests are rewarded by market-driven rewards. But is that even remotely possible to achieve in an industry that is already so heavily regulated that market-driven incentives are but a myth that stand in the way of collaboration and coordination?

Cheers,
  Sparky

Filed Under: Healthcare Process Improvement, In the News · Tagged: , , , ,
Big Data Meets the Value Paradigm
Jan 13, 2014

Big Data Meets the Value Paradigm

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VDO-Option3FlatA little over a year ago I shared a post on healthcare pricing: Pick A Price, Any Price. I wrote about the challenges, difficulties and consequences associated with the frustrating disconnect between hospital charges and the actual costs of proving care in those hospitals. At the time I also referenced the work of Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan that was published in the Harvard Business Review article, How to Solve the Cost Crisis in Healthcare.

I am excited to share with you research inspired by that article that was recently completed at the University of Utah, spearheaded by Dr. Vivian Lee, the senior vice president for health sciences and Dean of the University of Utah School of Medicine. Highlights of the research were published in the article, Hospitals Are In the Hot Seat, on the University of Health Sciences’ Algorithms for Innovation web site.

In a nutshell, colleagues representing several industry disciplines worked together to explore how harnessing Big Data and applied research might help empower patients and healthcare providers with more timely, more reliable – and most importantly, most understandable cost information and how costs compare to care received and outcomes achieved.

We’re all familiar with Peter Drucker’s challenge that, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Though less famous but probably more meaningful – or at least pragmatic – was Drucker’s quote that, “what’s measured improves.” Historically for healthcare trying to measure, apportion and determine meaningful costs at a granular enough level where that information has timely and impactful use has been elusive.

Here’s hoping this work is another step in the right direction.

Cheers,
  Sparky

Filed Under: In the News, Value Driven Healthcare · Tagged: , , ,
Jan 8, 2014

Healthcare 2014: The Untrends List

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One week into the new year, and here I am already probably tearing at the limits of content relevancy, thinking about how to write something meaningful on what to look for in 2014. What are the emerging industry trends and drivers that healthcare executives need to understand and reflect in their 2014 strategic planning? What’s the competitive landscape going to look like? How will diverging synergies of clinical partnerships impact silo management tendencies? How many overused business school concepts can be stuffed into a blog post?

To be candid, I really wanted to write something here that was keen on unique insights and observations. That had a lofty air containing pearls of wisdom. But the more I thought about what to write the more daunting became the effort of where to start, what to include and how to organize my thoughts without losing you to confusion and boredom in the first paragraph.

And being confused myself under the weight of my inability to organize that thinking it dawned upon me that I was tripping over the most common intellectual obstacle: failure to accept that too often our desire to embrace the complex hides our fear of accepting the wisdom of simplicity.  And that reminded me of the scene below between Billy Crystal and Jack Palance in City Slickers. It epitomizes the challenge we have in accepting simplicity.

Curly’s One Thing

So what’s the ONE THING that healthcare providers need to focus on in 2014? Easy answer: the same thing they needed to focus on in 2013. And 2005. And 1919. VALUE. But just as our understanding of life can be both simple and difficult – so too can learning to strategically position a healthcare organization around value.

The concept of providing value is ancient.  Yet the ability to create, deliver and capture value is an increasingly important – and contextual – competitive advantage when resources become constrained at the same time demand is accelerating. Value-based pricing and cost reimbursement models are only a part of the value-driven healthcare paradigm. It’s the small top part of the value delivery pyramid (or perhaps iceberg is a more fitting analogy).

Critically important to understand is what the patient values. And even more important is accepting the processes that patients use for determining and comparing relative value does not easily lend itself to linear thinking or evidence-based protocols. Similarly, the individuals who create and bring value to patients cannot be made to fit into standardized care delivery machines. And understanding how they assess and compare relative value is every bit as important in creating a competitively superior healthcare offering.

Healthcare providers are increasingly being asked to share in the risk of care delivery economics. I know that must sound ironically distasteful to many, since they have already for centuries borne the ultimate risk of patient outcomes. But on the whole, I believe it’s an oddity of our healthcare financing system – not a perverse entrapment designed to reallocate resources away from production – that seeks to align the incentives of multiple participants around value.

If, however, that understanding is ultimately manifested in just measuring and promoting value – without creating and delivering value – value-driven pricing and reimbursement models will necessarily fail, whether that’s payment bundling, ACOs or medical homes. But – those organizations that learn to create and deliver value by strategically positioning themselves in lieu of the industry migration toward integrated care delivery will survive whether those new models succeed or not.

So my list of trends and drivers for 2014 is simple: value, value & value.

Cheers,
  Sparky

Filed Under: Editorials & Opinions, Value Driven Healthcare · Tagged: , , ,
Dec 20, 2013

The Pain of Mental Illness

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Hidden not far at all beneath the tinsel and tapestry of joy that retailers and their ad companies ask us to gorge upon is the painful reality this “season” means to millions of individuals whose conscious awareness of emotional pain and loss is heightened at this time of year. For most of us in that boat it’s a time of year you just try and suck it up and get through. But for the millions of Americans and their families living with mental illness there is no emotional reprieve awaiting as the calendar page flips to January 1.

In June of this year, CNN reporter Wayne Drash was invited into the home of Stephanie Escamilla and her family to observe and understand the trials and tribulations of caring for a child with a mental illness. Her 14 year-old son Daniel (not his real name) has been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder with psychosis. Their story – of the deep emotional pain that attends mental illness – is chronicled in Drash’s story, My Son is Mentally Ill So Listen Up, featured on CNN’s web site.

Stephanie’s invitation was her way of trying to bring greater awareness and understanding of the challenges and caregiving concerns that have a tremendous impact on the informal caregivers of the mentally ill. And it was also her way of drawing attention to the tragic reality we face in this country that way, way too often treating mental illness is entirely reactive.

I’m not going to add anything here that hasn’t already been better articulated by clinicians and mental health practitioners in terms of advocating for the same proactive approach to diagnosing and treating mental illness as has been given to heart disease or breast cancer, as examples. I just wanted to share this story with you and hope you will take the time to listen. I think it is tremendously important.

Cheers,
  Sparky
 

Filed Under: In the News, Mental Health · Tagged: , ,
Sep 26, 2013

It’s About Value, Stupid

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The title of this post is a reminder to myself and not intended to offend the millions of other participants in healthcare to whom its application may or may not apply. I remind myself of this assertion quite often – primarily because I believe it provides the singular most important connection between the practice of healthcare and the business of healthcare. It also has the theoretical advantage of transcending many of the political realities of public policy because it reinforces commonly held beliefs regarding individual liberties, morality, as well as social consciousness.

That is why I am very excited about a new initiative I wanted to share with Pub visitors: last week, the New England Journal of Medicine announced a new collaborative publishing initiative with Harvard Business Review. Beginning on September 17th, new articles are being shared daily via the Insight Center for Leading Health Care Innovation.  Over an eight-week pilot period new articles will be posted daily, “from numerous experts across health care and business communities.” The content shared will be free during this pilot phase, so I strongly encourage you to at least take a few minutes to peruse the variety of information and insights offered there.

One of the most prominent initial contributors, Michael Porter, has written and spoken at length on Value in Healthcare. In fact, he and his coauthor, Elizabeth Olmsted Tiesberg, published Redefining Healthcare in 2006, in which they argued that historically health care systems have competed to shift costs, accumulate bargaining power and restrict services – rather than create value for patients. To address this shortfall Porter and Tiesberg have offered specific policy recommendations they believe can help reposition the potentially positive effects of market competition from between health plans, networks and hospitals to where it would be a lot more effective in producing value: i.e., at the level of diagnosis, treatment and prevention of high cost illness and conditions.

I should also note (and recommend) Porter’s latest article featured in the October issue of HBR and coauthored by Dr. Thomas Lee (CMO at Press Ganey), The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care. Porter and Lee rightly argue that healthcare providers are the only ones who can ultimately reframe the US healthcare delivery system into one that delivers high value. They discuss six interdependent components:

1. Organizing around patients’ medical condition
     rather than  physicians’ medical specialties
2. measuring costs and outcomes for each patient
3. developing bundled prices for the full care
    cycle
4. integrating care across separate facilities
5. expanding geographic reach and
6. building an enabling IT platform

I think they purposely left off #7, pushing the camel through the eye of a needle. Please don’t take my sarcasm for lack of interest and support, but I am of an age where I tend to be a realistic chap. Between the theory espoused on the pages of HBR and the practice that is often manifested in care providers’ growing frustration with the obstacles they face in caring for their patients lies the enormous ball of yarn, which has been healthcare public policy in the US for the past 50 years.

I do believe, however, the value paradigm offers great promise in building a healthcare system where lower cost and higher quality are not viewed as a diametric choice but rather complimentary results of market competition. But there are indeed miles to travel before any such paradigm shift can be realized.

Value is not a foreign concept to healthcare, so I want to be wary of conveying the sense that a silver bullet exists, just waiting to be found so that in a single shot our delivery system can be cured. But value – whether seen through the prism of a patient’s ability to assess a surgical procedure, an insurer’s ability to assess the quality of an outcome or a nurse’s ability to assess the fairness of his or her employment contract – is way too often obfuscated to the point where it cannot serve the purpose of driving competitive performance.

I am hopeful the contributors to the new Center will be mindful of this observation as they seek to promote the potential benefits of a value-driven healthcare system.

Cheers,
  Sparky

Filed Under: In the News, Value Driven Healthcare · Tagged: , , , , , ,
ACOs, Innovation and Edison
Jul 13, 2013

ACOs, Innovation and Edison

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070209_edison_bulbUnited Healthcare announced this week that it will double to $50 billion annually over the next five years the value of contracts it has with doctors and hospitals based on quality and outcome measures. United is currently paying over $20 billion annually to doctors, hospitals and ancillary care providers under contractual arrangements based on value produced (i.e., quality outcomes over cost).

United’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Sam Ho, notes that “any bonuses will have to be earned and no longer a product of turning a page on a calendar – this is not a passing fancy for us. The United Healthcare strategy basically has expanded the accountable care concept to an accountable care platform.” Beyond just the symbolic importance, United has the largest provider network in the U.S. and already has accountable care relationships in place with over than 575 hospitals, 1,100 medical groups and 75,000 physicians.

Now, the glass-half-empty folks in healthcare are going to look at this move by United as somewhere between tyrannical, prehensile or just plain foolish, depending on individual perception, as well as position. They will argue this is just another example of non-provider influences in healthcare stealing more power from the patient. They will remind us again how HMOs failed and that ACOs are but profiteering wolves clothed in retrofitted HMO attire.

Of the two most significant challenges that ACOs face, creating financial incentives that are theoretically aligned with less care instead of more is certainly reminiscent of managed care circa 1990s – and it is a risk that must be aggressively monitored and mitigated. The other primary challenge – the inherent subjectivity of measuring patient outcomes – will have a dramatic impact on many areas of future healthcare delivery, not just provider networks and insurance contracting. It’s a challenge that will have to be effectively addressed if we ever have any hope of increasing access without bankrupting the country.

I think there are two ways to look at these challenges: in the context of the past where abundant evidence of failure exists – or in the future, where evidence of failure has not yet been created. There is a critically important difference between the two. The former is the world of intellects and philosophers, while the latter is the world of innovators and entrepreneurs. Case in point: Thomas Edison.

In failing continually to invent the light bulb Edison once remarked, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” In similar fashion he once said, “negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”

I am not suggesting that unbridled experimentation is either wise nor prudent when the results impact human lives. But I also choose to resist the defeatist attitude among folks who become overly dependent upon history as a means of defining the future. While those who fail to learn from the past may be damned to repeat it – those who live in the past are damned to avoid innovation for fear of failure.

The underlying premise of the ACO model – financial reward for keeping people healthy, rather than reimbursement of costs for trying to make sick people well – represents a dramatic paradigm shift in thinking for this country that transcends all aspects of healthcare delivery. We should not expect it to be widely embraced in the short run. We should rightly expect a healthy amount of skepticism. And we shouldn’t be shocked if the model fails.

Those allowances, however, should not be permitted to thwart progress toward achieving expanded access to quality care, particularly for the least fortunate among us. If the failures of the past weighed most heavy on the efforts to define the future, we should not have to worry about how to make quality care available because there never would have been the advances achieved worth making available. Edison also once said that, “the doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease. ~ ”

Will he be right?

Cheers,
  Sparky

Filed Under: Accountable Care Organizations, In the News · Tagged: , , , ,
May 21, 2013

A Pub Celebration!

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FireworksI completely missed the One Year Anniversary of Sparky’s Policy Pub, which was last Tuesday (business is good, and nobody’s complaining). In the past year I contributed 70 posts that generated  roughly 3,600 views. Whether that’s above, below or right about average I have no idea. But I have had  a lot of fun writing each and every post, which was my goal to begin.

And it has been fascinating to follow the blog stat’s. My number one post continues to be Death Panels Just Won’t Die, which is hit upon most often by folks searching for information on whether knee replacements will be rationed under the Affordable Care Act. It’s for that very reason that post is also my favorite, as I tried very hard in it to combat the misinformation that exists about the Act and how that misinformation has been used to scare our most vulnerable members of society.

So to anyone and everyone who has taken the time to stop by the Pub and read my posts, I want to sincerely thank you for your time and interest. While I find great enjoyment in just having a reason to write, the recognition that comes from knowing someone else finds what I write worth their time to read is very special and very meaningful to me.

I have learned a lot on how to create content that is valuable, interesting and entertaining. I still have a lot to learn, and I am anxious to see where the year ahead will take me – and the Policy Pub.

See you in the Pub!!
  ~ Sparky

Filed Under: In the News, Public Policy · Tagged: , , ,
Apr 4, 2013

The Rising Costs of Dementia Care

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Research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine – Monetary Costs of Dementia in the United States – describes the projected economic consequences of caring for an aging population afflicted with various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

Separating the caregiving related costs attributable to dementia is challenging, if not impossible, because of the prevalence of comorbidity in individuals having dementia and because of the lack of quantifiable data reflecting the financial burden associated with informal caregiving. Using data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study, the study’s authors sought to adjust for such phenomena by parsing out data that is believed to reflect the marginal costs associated with dementia.

Their methodology looked at how these costs could vary over the spectrum of probability within a given population that an individual would be afflicted with dementia. Costs were stratified according to:
     Out of Pocket Spending
     Spending by Medicare
     Net Nursing Home Spending
     Formal and Informal Homecare

If the intuitive concern that the economic impact of an aging society will be dramatic, the aggregate cost projections from this research certainly reinforces that concern. With a prevalence rate of 14.7% of the US over the age of 70 having dementia, the current (2010) cost of care (not including the valuation of informal caregiving) is $109 billion. By 2040, if prevalence rates and utilization of non-informal services and care are held constant, that amount is projected to more than double.

The authors note that dementia is one of the most costliest diseases to society, yet 75% to 84% of attributable costs of dementia are related to institutional care (e.g., a nursing care facility) or home-based long-term care – i.e., as opposed to medical care. Healthcare providers in that space should recognize the challenges and opportunities of that consequence.

I think it is important to remember that the inherent subjectivity of the dataset – and the data elements represented – is a reality that cannot be overlooked. In addition, even if there wasn’t the inherent subjectivity, I’m not really sure of the article’s value, nor whether it is deserving of the attention received in the press. Perhaps there’s something there I missed.

Counting the number of teeth a shark has and noting their regenerative capabilities is a fascinating exercise, but it’s the shark that can kill you – not its teeth.

Cheers,
  Sparky

Special Note: last summer I shared with Pub visitors a webinar, Emerging Trends and Drivers in Dementia Care, presented by my Artower colleague, Lori Stevic-Rust, PhD ABPP, Board Certified Clinical Health Psychologist and nationally recognized authority on Alzheimer’s disease. Another plug here seems appropriate.

Filed Under: Alzheimer's/Dementia Care, In the News · Tagged: , , ,
Mar 21, 2013

Medicine Storm Clouds

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Trying to connect the dots in healthcare delivery can be a lot like stringing beads in a windstorm: the time spent getting even a few in place often comes at the expense of losing track of many others. Over the past few days I came across three articles that feel like they should be strung together because they share an unintentional common theme: what will the practice of medicine look like in a decade from now as more and more medical knowledge is captured and made available in the cloud: the Medicine Cloud.

The cloud I refer to of course is a metaphorical description of electronic computing resources (i.e., data storage, hardware and software) that are accessed by users through web browsers and light-weight desktop and/or mobile applications. There are significant advantages to healthcare providers leveraging cloud-based computing, notably a significant reduction in upfront investment – both in terms of time and capital. Lower maintenance costs, improved reliability and the facilitation of greater data sharing that can enable more efficient integrated care delivery and provider interoperability are also big advantages.

The three articles I reference above include:

    Through a Scanner Darkly: Three Health Care Trends
    for 2013 written by Dr. David Shaywitz in the
    Healthcare Blog;

      Brain Awareness, by Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the
     National Institute of Mental Health; and

      the third was an article shared by Dr. William Palmer
      in our HCPolicy online discussion group: Online
     learning: Campus 2.0 by M. Mitchell Waldrop in
     the March 13th edition of Nature Magazine.

From different perspectives each of these articles represent key trends and drivers likely to impact how Medicine is practiced in the future – and in particular, the impact information technology will have. And while there are reasons for optimism in how advancements in technology can lead to improved access, efficiency and productivity – information technology has so far not proven to be the panacea many practitioners had hoped for.

Sourcing, capturing and aggregating medical-based knowledge – and then making that knowledge readily available to clinicians (e.g., including physician extenders) can be incredibly enabling and empowering for both the clinician and the patient, particularly when it is made available in real time. But there are hugely challenging concerns and substantial public policy issues that I think we should be discussing.

For example, one major challenge – as shared by Dr. Shaywitz in his blog post – is finding balance between the current push toward practice standardization that information technology naturally enables and maintaining the valuable non-standardized realities of practitioner experience. Dr. Insel’s article succinctly explains just how far we are from understanding how the human brain functions. To the extent we come to view an electronic knowledgebase as replacing a trained and experienced clinical practitioner’s brain, I think we do so at great peril.

On the other hand, making more medical-based knowledge available at a lower cost (i.e., as shared in the Nature Magazine article) has the potential to address the looming challenge of primary care physician access. Indeed, knowledge is power, and we should never be afraid to pursue any opportunity that empowers more people with knowledge.

Of course, online courses cannot replace medical practicums, and we must not be led to believe that the accumulation of didactic knowledge can replace practice and experience. There are two ways to view this: as an obstacle that inhibits expansion of provider availability – especially the expansion of physician extenders – or as a reality that requires proactive planning to try and ensure practical alignment between provider capabilities and patient needs. And then we have to assess whether this is a phenomenon that should be addressed through public policy, and if so how.

Now throw into this mix the markedly different attitudes and perceptions of younger clinicians on the role information technology can (and should, in many of their minds) play in the future practice of medicine – and you have the makings of a public policy maelstrom. Even in the face of the recent recession, Gen Xers and Millennials still are looking at work-life balance as one of their primary concerns. While there is a lot to be said for the benefits to society in taking more time for the family and less for the fortune, I do fear the potential implications this can have if it precipitates an overreliance on the Medicine Cloud as a replacement for the Medicine Man/Woman.

Cheers,
  Sparky

Filed Under: In the News, Information Technology · Tagged: , , ,
Feb 24, 2013

Paging Dr. Watson . . .

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Watson, the IBM supercomputer, generated world interest in 2011 when it competed on Jeopardy against former champions of the famous TV game show and won the first prize reward of $1 million.  With access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage, Watson performed without having access to the Internet.  Ever since IBM’s Big Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997 IBM has doubled down on its passion for developing technology that seeks to mirror the capabilities of the human mind.

Now that passion is taking Watson into the hospital and physician office. A February 11, 2013 article in Wired Magazine UK, IBM’s Watson is better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors, describes how IBM is partnering with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and Wellpoint to make Watson available (i.e., for a fee) to any hospital or clinic seeking its input on oncology cases, including proposed treatment protocols that seek to minimize cost.

The big advantage Watson has over human doctors is its ability to absorb and analyze enormous quantities of data – and then make that knowledgebase more accessible and more affordable.  As example, according to Sloan-Kettering, only 20% of the knowledge doctors use in diagnosing patients relies on trial-based evidence.  But it would take at least 160 hours of reading a week to keep pace with all of the medical knowledge being published – and that doesn’t include the time it takes to determine how to apply that knowledge in practice. Watson’s successful diagnosis rate for lung cancer is 90 percent, compared to 50 percent for human doctors.

This subject-matter reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, in which he tackles the subject of rapid cognition: how the human mind processes environmental stimuli and compares, contrasts and analyzes that stimuli against the billions of elements of data that comprise individual experiences comprising our conscious and unconscious memories.  Watson’s ability to replicate that capability is still a long way off.  But the progress already made is fascinating.

While fascinating, practical application of technological advancements in healthcare are often challenged by skepticism. How much of that challenge is created by the natural human resistance to change, how much results from not understanding the new technology – and how much is based upon previous experiences that demonstrate the risks of adopting technology before it is fully proven – is hard to know.

A lot of faith is being put into technology as the silver bullet to address the healthcare cost crisis. When you read something like what IBM is accomplishing with Watson you want to jump on that bandwagon.  When you spend an afternoon with clinicians that share real life stories of how their ability to deliver care is being impeded by technology that was supposed to make them more efficient and productive – well, not so much.

Cheers,
  Sparky

Filed Under: Clinical Technology, In the News · Tagged: , , ,
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