Here’s the thing about non-healthcare companies coming into this $3 trillion industry and promising “disruption” or “revolution”: They often don’t get how healthcare works. The problem seems to be particularly acute in Silicon Valley, where people have changed so many other industries and believe they can fix this one.
Healthcare also happens to be swamped by acronyms, though that’s a common problem within pretty much any sector of business. Insiders come up with shortcuts, and they often stick.
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One that probably won’t stick is Internet of Medicine, or IoM. This term comes to us from Aria Systems, a San Francisco-based IT company that makes subscription billing technology to manage rentals and pay-per-use services.
This has relevance in healthcare. “For instance, rather than purchasing an expensive imaging device, smaller hospitals and facilities have opted to ‘rent’ the equipment for a monthly fee and charge per scan. Other hospitals have begun offering a pay-per-image service by storing medical images in the cloud rather than in an expensive on-premise storage system,” an Aria Systems publicist explained in an e-mail.
According to this pitch, the Internet of Medicine enables this “recurring revenue model.” Except that nobody, save perhaps Silicon Valley cheerleader TechCrunch in an article last month, uses the term “Internet of Medicine” or the IoM acronym.
Anyone who knows anything about healthcare in the U.S. recognizes IOM (all caps) as the Institute of Medicine. (However, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine stopped using the IOM name on March 16. Meet the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies, or HMD.
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That’s dumb, no? People got used to CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) in the early 2000s after the Bush administration decided the old name, HCFA, for Health Care Financing Administration, was clunky and bureaucratic.
But HMD instead of IOM? Some names need to be left alone. Here in Chicago, the tallest building in town has been called Willis Tower since 2009, but defiant locals hold on to the iconic original name, Sears Tower.
I cringe every time someone refers to the Veterans Administration, even though VA has stood for the Department of Veterans Affairs since 1989. It may be force of habit that keeps the old name alive, or it may be the fact the acronym hasn’t changed.
Plenty of people inside the Beltway still refer to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as simply “National Airport,” even though the name changed in 1998. Again, force of habit, though your choice of what to call that airport may depend on your political affiliation.
Some vendor might try to force the IoM name on us, but I just don’t see it sticking. Interestingly, this infographic from Aria Systems seems to imply that this Internet of Medicine is just a subset of the Internet of Things, even though telemedicine and pharmaceutical research are more about the Internet and the data than the “things.”
(Click here to view a full-size version.)
Photos: Flickr user Jack Dorsey, Aria Systems