Why Your Health IT Clients Could Be Slow To Move To New Technologies
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Medical technology has reached a point where you can do a cardiogram, examine a child’s eardrum, diagnose skin rashes, even refract your eyes, all with a smartphone, and according to Dr. Eric Topol, that’s just the beginning.
During HIMSS15, Dr. Topol, chief academic officer with Scripps Health, who also oversees the Scripps Translational Science Institute, spoke with Health IT Outcomes about how routine diagnostic and monitoring functions are increasingly shifting toward the individual in the same way the printing press brought information via the written word to the masses.
All of this, of course, is enabled by what Dr. Topol refers to as “an amazing digital infrastructure,” specifically, the powers of cloud computing to take raw data and turn it into something useful and accurate.
Medicine’s “Paternalistic” Reaction
Dr. Topol says, however, the healthcare industry has been its own worst enemy against democratizing medicine as well as other aspects of technological advancement. He blames much of the lack of adoption on the medicine itself — something he attributes to the orientation of the medical community: “...There are a lot of reasons why there is a lack of adoption. One of them is this isn’t exactly going over well with the medical community, because essentially it is a whole different bypass, if you will. It’s a loss of control of the paternalistic medical community. That’s one thing. The other is it is very new. A lot of these tools have just come out in the last year or two, and a whole lot more in the queue. A lot of things don’t change much in medicine. It took 115 years before there was the new hospital that didn’t have a shoot-the-moon quality.”
He also stressed the importance of younger, digital natives who will drive the demand for instant data, as well as how the earth is being “flattened with cheap chips” — items and services that used to cost hundreds to thousands of dollars are now being put into use for less than a couple of dollars. For example, we’re seeing smartphones that can diagnose cancer in 40 minutes for $1.80 and complete (and accurate) HIV and syphilis diagnoses performed in Rwanda for 50 cents.
The Downside: Security And Patient Ownership Of Data
While advancements in technology have the ability to bring balance to the over-stretched doctor (by pushing more demands for data off to the patient), but this brings up issues around privacy, security, and even individual user preference — not everyone will want complete control over their data.
Dr. Topol is careful to point out that larger calls for the death of privacy can’t be applied to the medical field: “This is precious information, and people do not want it out there. The bar is different here, and we have to recognize that. There are … cyber measures to really enhance security that are not being used … There’s also the government that has not given rightful ownership to the people of their data, and now, that data is owned by doctors and hospitals, and that’s not right. You pay for your services. It’s your data, and you don’t even own it? What other sector is there in the world that works like that?”