Hospitals

Here’s what true digital disruption looks like

This chart encapsulates how digital health technologies can eviscerate traditional industry paradigms. It will happen in healthcare too - eventually.

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This one chart says it all about the power of digital technologies to upend traditional industry paradigms. 

OK, so it isn’t healthcare, but you get the picture. This is in 10 short years.

And let’s remind ourselves of the argument for why brick and mortar retailers sat smugly when e-commerce first showed up. The argument was simply this: Oh, consumers want to touch and feel and/or try on before they purchase, so this online buying is never ever going to work.

10 years later and … boom. That’s the sound of traditional retail imploding.

Now healthcare, as our ever-so-perceptive president has figured out, is a trifle more complicated than that. Choosing an ill-fitting outfit based on your computer screen’s rendering won’t exactly kill you. Consumers were and are ready for a little bit of trial and error in the e-commerce world.

That isn’t possible in the regulated world of healthcare where the bar — quite rightly — is high.

But even organizations that are overtly entrusted with the safekeeping of the American consumer — for instance the American Medical Association — are understanding and embracing the power of digital tools.

The AMA, whose roots date back to 1847, is the founding investor in Health2047, a San Francisco startup that is aimed at encouraging innovation by bridging the gap between the tech and medical communities.

And last week at MedCity News’ healthcare investing forum in Chicago —INVEST— Michael Tutty, group vice president of professional satisfaction and practice sustainability, talked about a new program that provides kind of a matchmaking service between physicians interested in the next new thing and healthcare entrepreneurs. The program is known as the Physician Innovation Network.

“It’s more eHarmony than Tinder,” joked Tutty of the free service to audience laughter.

Eharmony and Match.com replaced the informal matchmaking that the parent, friend and relative network provided to countless singles. But in healthcare, we are still in the awkward first-date stage where everyone understands the value of being in the dating game, but isn’t sure whether this particular individual is the One.

Hospitals and healthcare systems are attempting to give digital health a go by piloting technologies of all kinds and someone out there should create a “death by a thousand pilots”  meme.

Awkward and halting efforts notwithstanding, there appears to be some method to the madness. At least at some medical institutions.

At Northwestern Medicine, digital health entrepreneurs may win if they deliver solutions in the four areas of innovation that the organization deems important: telehealth, value-based care, workflow efficiency and the digital patient experience. That’s according to Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, director of innovation, who was a speaker at MedCity INVEST on a panel that addressed what hospitals believe to be important in embracing digital health.

On that same panel, Carolyn Jasik, medical director of Omada Health, implied that developing technology for technology’s sake just won’t do. Consider whether there’s “a market need in the health system for that solution,” she said, adding that entrepreneurs need to “offer a solution that doesn’t just make clinical sense, but makes business sense as well.”

Omada Health is one of the few and hopefully growing number of serious digital health companies that have taken the effort to validate its products. In Omada’s case, it’s an online diabetes management program. The validation has convinced the likes of Intermountain Healthcare, the Utah health system, which is using Omada’s 16-week online program to manage its prediabetes population.

But to the average consumer without a chronic condition, keeping track of your health may simply mean downloading one of the many thousands of apps being bandied about in the Apple App store. Many of these are suspect at best, as Tutty demonstrated on stage at MedCity INVEST. Unless you read the fine print, you may not even know that the blood pressure app you just downloaded is not only not validated but is meant as a prank, he said.

This is of course precisely why digital health technologies won’t see the phenomenal shift of value toward them in the way Amazon does in the chart above. In fact, in the wild wild West of app stores and jokes masquerading as medical tools, it would be harmful if it did.

But that doesn’t erase the value that responsible digital health tools applied in a smart way can have on our healthcare industry. Watch out for a less dramatic but nonetheless wondrous digital health chart a few years down the road.

Photo:  phive2015,  Getty Images

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