Technology versus behavior, in healthcare and business.
Chuck Salter wrote a typically smart take on some of the technological advances in American medicine in this article:
It’s recommended reading if you care about health care. I’ve met Chuck and admired his work for years, so don’t take what I’m about to say as a criticism of him or his article.
He first points out some of the key problems with medical care in the United States: “Although we have the world’s most expensive health-care system, 24 countries have a longer life expectancy and 34 have a lower infant-mortality rate.” Then he explains how new generations of both doctors and technology are helping to address those problems, and how the “ability to expand and harness knowledge . . . makes cutting-edge information technology such a powerful driver of the emerging health-care revolution.” The article is interesting and well-reported, and it’s not Chuck’s job to go into every aspect of the health care equation in this country — which, you may have noticed, is complicated.
But as you and I think about addressing problems, we ought to be leery of putting too much emphasis on new technology to get us out of old problems. This applies just as well to great big problems like health care and climate change as it does to smaller ones like, oh, declining cash flows or increasing employee turnover in your own business.
Mind you, I like my high tech, and indeed I spent several enjoyable years covering it for Hoover’s, but it’s a trap to focus on technological solutions to the exclusion of behavioral ones.
Here’s what I mean: the advances that Chuck is writing about — things like social media-enabled telemedicine and robot-assisted surgery — clearly can do wonderful things for American medicine. But it wasn’t the absence of these things that led to the problems we face. We’re not 35th in infant mortality because we lack technology or money; we’re 35th because we haven’t behaved as smartly as (at least some of) the 34 countries ahead of us.
If you’re umpteenth in your industry, it’s probably not strictly because your technology is poor. It comes from a thousand little and big things that have compounded together over the years to render the whole less than the sum of its parts — just like the American health-care system.
Now, set aside your pipe dreams of technological fixes. How can you BEHAVE differently this week to put yourself in a better position?
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Photo by kokopinto, used under a Creative Commons license.
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This, of course, is why I rebel against technological solutions to email like Xobni. Nice software to be sure, but not an answer to the root cause of the problem. To your point, the problem is with behaviors, not technology.
Toyota is quite slow to introduce new technology — they feel that it’s insane to automate a broken process, since all you get is a faster (and more expensive) broken process.
Truer words were never spoken about healthcare.
This, of course, is why I rebel against technological solutions to email like Xobni. Nice software to be sure, but not an answer to the root cause of the problem. To your point, the problem is with behaviors, not technology.
Toyota is quite slow to introduce new technology — they feel that it’s insane to automate a broken process, since all you get is a faster (and more expensive) broken process.
Truer words were never spoken about healthcare.
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!
Chuck would appear to have a near-terminal case of BSTS – bright, shiny thing syndrome not to mention the breathless tone of wonder. There are two ways to approach HC and HC IT. Outside-in or inside-out and you need to do both. Outside-in we spend too much on things that can’t be helped, have the wrong incentives and payment schemes, etc. etc. The good news is that those are widely understood problems and the better is that the momentum is as high as it’s ever been for a cooperative solution. Looking at it inside-out gets us to the bad. The key to building good solutions is understanding how a business works – been doing it for 25+ years and fighting lack of support every minute. The first barrier is that healthcare workflow processes are incredibly complicated – the most convoluted I’ve ever worked on. The basic theory behind quality standards, DRG reimbursement and all the other palliatives is that there’ a problem with a diagnosis, a treatment, a code and a payment. Couldn’t be more false to fact. On top of which a) we’ve over-sold tech that didn’t fit and didn’t work, b) browbeat the practioners, c) have no, I repeat NO, IT infrastructure and app portfolio the way the business world understands it (w/o apps there’s no place for the data from the BSTs to go) and are roughly about where the bizz world was circa 1960 with technology. There’s lots of neat stuff but that’s not where the problem lies.