What does the future hold for health-care technology? Sean Mehra, head of product at HealthTap (and a Stanford business-school grad), weighs in today on VentureBeat. Among his seven predictions is that "tech will catalyze drastic system-wide cost savings and efficiencies:"
To cope [with the 30 to 40 million Americans entering the healthcare system in 2014 under Obamacare], we will need an efficient system to triage health queries and manage patients based on urgency, severity, and available capacity. Furthermore, technology must enable doctors to care for larger patient populations more quickly and without compromising quality of care. Smart dashboards, alerts, reports, automated follow-ups, synchronous and asynchronous communication, and data sharing all will become part of a doctor’s “command center” that helps him or her monitor the health of thousands of patients simultaneously.
Innovation can expand the “production possibilities frontier” for any capital- and labor-constrained market. The potential impact of technology is immense. For example, of the $1.8 trillion spent annually on healthcare in the U.S., roughly $500 billion is spent on doctor-patient visits alone. Roughly 25 percent of these visits are purely informational (no procedures are performed, and no prescriptions are written). If technology can efficiently serve patients seeking such visits, annual healthcare costs could immediately and dramatically drop by $125 billion.
Previously: Ask Stanford Med: Answers to your questions on health-care innovation, Medicine is about to be “Schumpetered” – and go through its biggest shake-up in history, Moore’s Law? Not so much for health-care technology and Technology adoption and the health-care industry
Via @Stanford
