In a speech given at the Mayo Clinic Design Symposium Transform by the author of The Innovator's Prescription, Clayton Christenson, the intangible problem of the business model of healthcare is discussed in length. Christenson begins by discussing why success is hard to sustain, how it is disrupted and decentralized, and why this disruption needs to happen in the medical world. An example described is Toyota working from cheap - to expensive in car models as opposed to General Motors and how Toyota succeeded in the end. While it's not tangible to expect difficult hospitals to become cheap we can solve the problem though driving the decentralization of the industry. Medical Technology should move to outpatient clinics and clinics should become capable of performing advanced tasks through the simplification of technology-essentially meaning rethinking the roles that caregivers play. Hospitals should move toward specialty and away from general practice in a value adding process. One example given is a man who at one point paid over $1000 dollars a month on allergy medicine who went to the National Jewish hospital. He sat in a room and had 4 specialty physicians argue over what was wrong with him. They concluded that his solution was an over the counter allergy treatment. This hospital was intergrated in the correct way to diagnose and fix problems as opposed to hospitals that decouple processes to maximize flexibility. In summary, hospitals need to move away from trial and error intuitive medicine towards pattern recognition which will bring the world closer to bimarkers of precision medicine and away from intuitive diagnosis in medicine.
1 comment:
Amanda,
I listened to the video clip that you linked to, but I don't see the connection between that speech about pre-med students and your description of the author's idea of restructuring the health care system. Can you provide some additional information about this? Do you see the germ of a thesis project here? The guy in the video was talking about pre-med students going around with patients when they are being diagnosed with serious illnesses. If, indeed, there becomes a new class of medical "scribe", someone whose job it is to interpret the medical system and navigate the difficult process of deciding what treatment to accept from doctors who have a financial stake in treating you. You have to figure that that doctors, regardless of their oath to do no harm, respond to economic incentives as much as everyone, so it's not hard to understand why, if someone has insurance, the medical industry will over medicate.
Post a Comment