The myth of digital natives and health IT

I have a post on the CCIO website on the Digital Native myth and Health IT. 

The opening paragraph: 

We hear a lot about digital natives. They are related to the similarly much-mentioned millenials; possibly they are exactly the same people (although as I am going to argue that digital natives do not exist, perhaps millenials will also disappear in a puff of logic). Born after 1980, or maybe after 1984, or maybe after 1993, or maybe after 2007, or maybe after 2010, the digital native grew up with IT, or maybe grew up with the internet, or grew up with social media, or at any rate grew up with something that the prior generation – the “digital immigrants” (born a couple of years before the first cut off above, that’s where I am too) – didn’t.

Morale, adaptive reserve and innovation

I have another blog post on the CCIO website – the contents of which may remind readers here of this and this and also this – so here is the Greatest Hits version:

 

POSTED BY SEAMUS MACSUIBHNE ON 8TH MARCH 2017 POSTED IN INNOVATION

On the ARCH (Applied Research in Connected Health) website, research lead Dr Maria Quinlan recently wrote a post called Happy Organisations and Happy Workers – a key factor in implementing digital health.

In the opening paragraph, Dr Quinlan invokes Anna Karenina:

 

To paraphrase Tolstoy, “all happy organisations are alike; each unhappy organisation is unhappy in its own way.” The ability for healthcare organisations to innovate is a fundamental requirement for adopting and sustainably scaling digital health solutions.  If an organisation is unhappy, for example if it is failing to communicate openly and honestly, if staff feel overworked and that their opinion isn’t valued, it stands to reason that it will have trouble innovating and handling major complex transitions.

The whole post is a fascinating read, with implications for team functioning beyond the implementation of digital health and indeed beyond healthcare itself. Dr Quinlan cites research on what makes a happy worker;

What these factors combine to achieve is happy, engaged workers – and happy workers are more effective, compassionate, and less likely to suffer burnout. Clear objectives, praise, a sense that your voice matters – these can seem like fluffy ‘soft’ concepts and yet they are found over and over to be central to providing the right context within which new digital health innovations can flourish. Classic ‘high involvement’ management techniques – for example empowering team members to make decisions and not punishing them for every misstep are found to be key.  As Don Berwick of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) says, people who feel joy in work are “not scared of data”, rather “joy is a resource for excellence” 

Dr Quinlan goes on to describe the high rates of burnout and emotional exhaustion among healthcare workers. Unfortunately this is a phenomenon that has been consistent in survey after survey. Not only does poor morale compromise the introduction of innovation, it also causes direct human suffering and compromises what an organisation is trying to achieve.

The concept of “adaptive reserve” is an important one, especially in the context of reforms and innovations being introduced into already pressured environments:

Adaptive reserve is an internal capability for change which includes being agile; capable of continuous learning; and being adept at self-assessment, reflection and improvisation. The Adaptive Reserve questionnaire asks staff to rate their organisation according to a variety of statements which include statements such as; ‘we regularly take time to consider ways to improve how we do things’ and ‘this organisation is a place of joy and hope’.

There is sometimes an urge to reform or innovate our way out of the situation healthcare finds itself in, and yet the concept of Adaptive Reserve suggests that this is inverting how reform and innovation work; there needs to be not just systematic space and infrastructure for it to happen, but psychological space among staff.

A related blog post on the ARCH website by Dr Marcella McGovern on the blame culturethat exists within many organisations, and particularly in the Irish health care context is worth reading. Dr McGovern uses Melvin Dubnick’s framework of “prejudicial blame culture” to describe how systems focused on blame stifle initiative and responsibility.

Google recently completed Project Aristotle, a study of what makes a successful team. Far and away the most important factor is “psychological safety” – “Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?”  Focusing on technological fixes in the absence of a sense of psychological safety is a recipe for innovations to fail and for morale to decrease further. Can technology, in and of itself, foster psychological safety? My inclination is to say no, that psychological safety is much more about interpersonal relationships within a team and a system. What technology may be able to do – in a positive sense – is help facilitate team communication.

Of course, this also has to be carefully thought through. Evgeny Morozov’s “To Solve Everything, Click Here”  is a fascinating and at times rather frustrating book which takes a searching look at technology in the modern world. Morozov is against both the excessive hype of technological utopians and the excessive gloom of technological pessimists. He strongly decries what he calls “solutionism”:

“solutionism.” … has come to refer to an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental and narrow-minded solutions – the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences – to problems that are extremely complex, fluid and contentious. These are the kind of problems that, on careful examination, do not have to be defined in the singular and all-encompassing ways that “solutionists” have defined them; what’s contentious then, is not their proposed solution but their very definition of the problem itself. Design theorist Michael Dobbins has it right: solutionism presumes rather than investigates the problems that it is trying to solve, reaching “for the answer before the questions have been fully asked.” How problems are composed matters every bit as much as how problems are resolved.

The problems of healthcare are truly “extremely complex, fluid and contentious” and any honest attempt to solve them must engage with this complexity.  Can judicious innovation help foster psychological safety within a team, and thereby not only create happiness among health workers but also help them achieve the organisational goals they are engaged in meeting?

 

“Huge ($$), broken, and therefore easily fixed” : re-reading Neil Versel’s Feb 2013 column “Rewards for watching TV vs rewards for healthy behavior”

Ok, it may seem somewhat arbitrary to bring up a column on MobiHealthNews, a website which promises the latest in digital health news direct to your inbox. However this particular column, and also some of the responses which Versel provoked (collected here), struck a chord with me at the time and indeed largely inspired my presentation at this workshop at the 2013 eChallenges conference.

In 2012 I had beta tested a couple of apps in the general health field (I won’t go into any more specifics) – none of which seemed clinically useful. My interest in healthcare technology had flowed largely from my interest in technology in medical education. Versel’s column, and the comments attributed to “Cynical” in the follow up column by Brian Dolan, struck a chord. I also found they transcended the often labyrinthine structures of US Healthcare.

The key paragraph of Versel’s original column was this

What those projects all have in common is that they never figured out some of the basic realities of healthcare. Fitness and healthcare are distinct markets. The vast majority of healthcare spending comes not from workout freaks and the worried well, but from chronic diseases and acute care. Sure, you can prevent a lot of future ailments by promoting active lifestyles today, but you might not see a return on investment for decades.

..but an awful lot of it is worth quoting:

Pardon my skepticism, but hasn’t everyone peddling a DTC health tool focused on user engagement? Isn’t that the point of all the gamification apps, widgets and gizmos?

I never was able to find anything unique about Massive Health, other than its Massive Hype. It had a high-minded business name, a Silicon Valley rock star on board — namely former Mozilla Firefox creative lead Asa Raskin — and a lot of buzz. But no real breakthroughs or much in the way of actual products.

….

Another problem is that Massive Health, Google Health, Revolution Health and Keas never came to grips with the fact that healthcare is unlike any other industry.

In the case of Google and every other “untethered” personal health record out there, it didn’t fit physician workflow. That’s why I was disheartened to learn this week that one of the first twodevelopment partners for Walgreens’ new API for prescription refills is a PHR startup called Healthspek. I hate to say it, but that is bound to fail unless Walgreens finds a way to populate Healthspek records with pharmacy and Take Care Health System clinic data.

Predictably enough, there was a strong response to Versel’s column. Here is Dr Betsy Bennet:

As a health psychologist with a lot of years in pharma and healthcare, I am continually frustrated with the hype that accompanies most “health apps”. Not everyone enjoys computer games, not everyone wants to “share” the issues they’re ashamed of with their “social network”, not everyone is interested in being a “quantified self”. This is not to say that digital health is futile or a bad idea. But if we took the time to understand why so many doctors hate EHRs and patients are not interested in paying to “manage their health information” (What does that mean, anyway?) we would come a long way towards finding digital interventions that people actually want to use.

 

The most trenchant (particularly point 1) comment was from “Cynical”

Well written. This is one of the few columns (or rants) that actually understands the reality of healthcare and digital health (attending any health care conference will also highlight this divide). What I am finding is two fold:

1. The vast majority of these DTC products are created by people who have had success in other areas of “digital” – and therefore they build what they know – consumer facing apps / websites that just happen to be focused in health. They think that healthcare is huge ($$), broken, and therefore easily fixed using the same principals applied to music, banking, or finding a movie. But they have zero understanding of the “business of healthcare”, and as a result have no ability to actually sell their products into the health care industry – one of the slowest moving, convoluted, and cumbersome industries in the world.

2. Almost none of these products have any clinical knowledge closely integrated — many have a doctor (entrepreneur) on the “advisory board”, but in most cases there are no actual practicing physicians involved (physician founders are often still in med school, only practiced for a limited time, or never at all). This results in two problems – one of which the author notes – no understanding of workflow; the other being no real clinical efficacy for the product — meaning, they do not actually improve health, improve efficiency, or lower cost. Any physician will be able to lament the issues of self-reported data…

Instead of hanging out at gyms or restaurants building apps for diets or food I would recommend digital health entrepreneurs hang out in any casino in America around 1pm any day of the week – that is your audience. And until your product tests well with that group, you have no real shot.

This perspective from Jim Bloedau is also worth quoting., given how much of the rhetoric on healthcare and technology is focused on the dysfunctionality of the current system:

Who likes consuming healthcare? Nobody. How many providers have you heard say they wish they could spend more time in the office? Never. Because of this, the industry’s growth has been predicated on the idea that somebody else will do it all for me – employers will provide insurance and pay for it, doctors will provide care. This is also the driver of the traditional business model for healthcare that many pundits label as a “dysfunctional healthcare system.” Actually, the business of healthcare has been optimized as it has been designed – as a volume based business and is working very well.

Coming up to four years on, and from my own point of viewing having had further immersion in the health IT world, how does it stack up? Well, for one thing I seem not to hear the word “gamification” quite that much. There seems to be a realisation that having “clinical knowledge closely integrated” is not a nice to have have but an absolute sine qua non. Within the CCIO group and from my experience of the CCIO Summer school, there certain isn’t a sense that healthcare is going to be “easily fixed” by technology. Bob Wachter’s book and report also seem to have tempered much hype.

Yet an awful lot of Versel’s original critique and the responses he provoked still rings true about the wider culture and discussion of healthcare and technology, not in CCIO circles in my experience but elsewhere. There is still often a rather  inchoate assumption that the likes of the FitBit will in some sense transform things. As Cynical states above, in the majority of cases self-reported data is something there are issues with, (there are exceptions such as mood and sleep diaries, and Early Warning Signals systems in bipolar disorder, but there too a simplicity and judiciousness is key)

Re-reading his blog post I am also struck by his  lede, which was that mobile tech has enabled what could be described as the Axis of Sedentary to a far greater degree than it has enable the forces of exercise and healthy eating. Versel graciously spent some time on the phone with me prior to the EuroChallenges workshop linked to above and provided me with very many further insights. I would be interested to know what he makes of the scene outlined in his column now.

The perils of trying to do too much: data, the Life Study, and Mission Overload

One interesting moment at the CCIO Network Summer School came in a panel discussion. A speaker was talking about the vast amount of data that can be collected and how impractical this can be. He gave the example of – while acknowledging that he completely understood why this particular data might be interesting – the postcode of  the patients most frequent visitor. As someone pointed out from the audience, the person in the best position to collect this data is probably the patient themselves.

When I heard this discussion, the part of my that still harbours research ambitions thought “that is a very interesting data point.” And working in a mixed urban/rural catchment area, in a service which has experienced unit closures and admission bed centralisation, I thought of how illustrative that would be of the personal experience behind these decisions.

However, the principle that was being stated – that clinical data is that which is generated in clinical activity – seems to be one of the only ways of keeping the potential vast amount of data that could go into an EHR manageable. Recently I have been reading Helen Pearson’s “The Life Project” , a review of which will shortly enough appear. Pearson tells the story of the UK Birth Cohort Studies. Most of this story is an account of these studies surviving against the institutional odds and becoming key cornerstones of British research. Pearson explicitly tries to create a sense of civic pride about these studies, akin to that felt about the NHS and BBC. However, in late 2015 the most recent birth cohort study, the Life Study, was cancelled for sheer lack of volunteers. The reasons for this are complex, and to my mind suggest something changing in British society in general (in the 1946 study it was assumed that mothers would simply comply with the request to participate as a sort of extension of wartime duty) – but one factor was surely the amount of questions to be answered and samples to be given:

But the Life Study aims to distinguish itself, in particular by collecting detailed information on pregnancy and the first year of the children’s lives — a period that is considered crucial in shaping later development.

The scientists plan to squirrel away freezer-fulls of tissue samples, including urine, blood, faeces and pieces of placenta, as well as reams of data, ranging from parents’ income to records of their mobile-phone use and videos of the babies interacting with their parents. (from Feb 2015 article in Nature by Pearson)

All very worthy, but it seems to me that the birth cohort studies were victims of their own success. Pearson describes that, almost from the start, they were torn between a more medical outlook and a more sociological outlook. Often this tension was fruitful, but in the case of Life Study it seems to have led to a Mission Overload.

I have often felt that there is a commonality of interest between the Health IT community, the research methodology community, and the medical education community and the potential of EHRs for epidemiology research, dissemination of best evidence at point of care  and realistic “virtual patient” construction is vast. I will come back to these areas of commonality again. However, there is also a need to remember the different ways a clinician, an IT professional, an epidemiologist, an administrator, and an educationalist might look at data. The Life Study perhaps serves as a warning.

Unintended consequences and Health IT

Last week along with other members of the Irish CCIO group I attended the UK CCIO Network Summer School. Among many thought provoking presentations and a wonderful sense of collegiality (and the scale of the challenges ahead), one which stood out was actually a video presentation by Dr Robert Wachter, whose review into IT in the NHS (in England) is due in the coming weeks and who is also the author of “The Digital Doctor: Hype, Hope and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age”

Amongst many other things, Dr Wachter discussed the unintended consequences of Health IT. He discussed how, pretty much overnight, radiology imaging systems destroyed “radiology rounds” and a certain kind of discussion of cases. He discussed how hospital doctors using eHealth systems sit in computer suites with other doctors, rather than being on the wards. Perhaps most strikingly, he showed a child’s picture of her visit to the doctor. in which the doctor is turned away from the patient and her mother, hunched over a keyboard:

This reminded me a little of Cecil Helman’s vision of the emergence of a “technodoctor”, which I suspected was something of a straw man:

Like may other doctors of his generation – though fortunately still only a minority – Dr A prefers to see people and their diseases mainly as digital data, which can be stored, analysed, and then, if necessary, transmitted – whether by internet, telephone or radio – from one computer to another. He is one of those helping to create a new type of patient, and a new type of patient’s body – one much less human and tangible than those cared for by his medical predecessors. It is one stage further than reducing the body down to a damaged heart valve, an enlarged spleen or a diseased pair of lungs. For this ‘post-human’ body is one that exists mainly in an abstract, immaterial form. It is a body that has become pure information.

I still suspect this is overall a straw man, and Helman admits this “technodoctor” is “still only [part of] a minority” – but perhaps the picture above shows this is less of a straw man than we might be comfortable with.

Is there a way out of the trap of unintended consequences? On my other blog I have posted on Evgeny Morozov’s “To Solve Everything, Click Here.”  a book which, while I had many issue with Morozov’s style and approach (the post ended up being over 2000 words which is another unintended consequence), is extremely thought-provoking. Morozov positions himself against “epochalism” – the belief that because of technology (or other factors) we live in a unique era. He also decries “solutionism”, a more complex phenomenon, of which he writes:

I call the ideology that legitimizes and sanctions such aspirations “solutionism.” I borrow this unabashedly pejorative term from the world of architecture and urban planning – where it has come to refer to an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental and narrow-minded solutions – the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences – to problems that are extremely complex, fluid and contentious. These are the kind of problems that, on careful examination, do not have to be defined in the singular and all-encompassing ways that “solutionists” have defined them; what’s contentious then, is not their proposed solution but their very definition of the problem itself. Design theorist Michael Dobbins has it right: solutionism presumes rather than investigates the problems that it is trying to solve, reaching “for the answer before the questions have been fully asked.” How problems are composed matters every bit as much as how problems are resolved.

As will be very clear from my other article, I don’t quite buy everything Morozov is selling (and definitely not the way he sells it!) , but in this passage I believe we are close to something that can help us avoid some of the traps that lead to unintended consequences. Of courses, these are by definition unintended, and so perhaps not that predictable, but by investigating rather than presuming the problems we are trying to solve, and not reaching for the answer before the questions have been fully asked, perhaps future children’s pictures of their trip to the hospital won’t feature a doctor turning their back on them to commune with the computer.

Apologia pro blogging-hiata sua

Somewhat without my being aware of it, this blog has been pretty quiet for a while – indeed I have mainly been reblogging other people’s content or posts from my other blog .

 

There are a few reasons for this. Primarily, my involvement in the CCIO and specifically the Lighthouse Projects has obviously taken up more of my time.

 

Secondly, to a certain degree this blog’s original intention of being a personal archive of my more medically themed writing has reached a little bit of a stop – most of what I can easily access of my own writing has already been posted. There is still quite a bit of stuff I have written for the Irish Medical Times and Eurotimes which I have not full access to, but the interest of this may be limited. There are also some academic papers I have written. However most of the purely medical writing I have done which is readily accessible is now somewhere on this blog.

 

Thirdly, both this blog and my other one were  intended as purely personal fora for working out ideas and to find common themes in my writing. With both, I have found a more public purpose also. On the Seamus Sweeney blog I have found myself exploring my interest in nature more and more, and dipping my toe in the world of nature blogging .In a way, the blog has helped me notice that this interest is more than an “interest” but something vital and key for me. Here, the blog has been a forum to discuss meetings I have been to and in particular my journey into CCIO land , as well as bookmarking paper that seem interesting (or just odd)

Finally (for now), I practice medicine as Séamus Mac Suibhne and for everything else, including non-medical writing, I am Séamus Sweeney. This developed not through any design on my part but simply because my birth cert is in Irish, therefore my degree, therefore my Medical Council registration and so on. However, one wouldn’t have to be any sort of psychotherapist to interpret this split in all sorts of interesting ways, some of which might even be correct. Of late I have noticed a bit of a convergence of interests between Séamus Mac and Séamus S, most evident here by the reblogging of pieces from one blog on the other. So perhaps this dichotomy may be closing.

I am hoping in the coming weeks to be able to blog a little bit more here. On the Lighthouse Projects in particular I hope to have some exciting announcements. I can also reveal that I have been given a copy of Helen Pearson’s Life Project to review.

 

#irishmed, Telemedicine and “Technodoctors”

This evening (all going well) I will participate in the Twitter #irishmed discussion, which is on telemedicine.

On one level, telemedicine does not apply all that much to me in the clinical area of psychiatry. It seems most appropriate for more data-driven specialties, or ones which have a much greater role for interpreting (and conveying the results of!) lab tests. Having said that, in the full sense of the term telemedicine does not just refer to video consultations but to any remote medical interaction. I spend a lot of time on the phone.

I do have a nagging worry about the loss of the richness of the clinical encounter in telemedicine. I am looking forward to having some interesting discussions on this this evening. I do worry that this is an area in which the technology can drive the process to a degree that may crowd out the clinical need.

The following quotes are ones I don’t necessarily agree with at all, but are worth pondering. The late GP/anthropologist Cecil Helman wrote quite scathingly of the “technodoctor.” In his posthumously published “An Amazing Murmur of the Heart”, he wrote:

 

Young Dr A, keen and intelligent, is an example of a new breed of doctor – the ones I call ‘techno-doctors’. He is an avid computer fan, as well as a physician. He likes nothing better than to sit in front of his computer screen, hour after hour, peering at it through his horn-rimmed spectacles, tap-tapping away at his keyboard. It’s a magic machine, for it contains within itself its own small, finite, rectangular world, a brightly coloured abstract landscape of signs and symbols. It seems to be a world that is much easier for Dr A to understand , and much easier for him to control, than the real world –  one largely without ambiguity and emotion.

Later in the same chapter he writes:

 

Like may other doctors of his generation – though fortunately still only a minority – Dr A prefers to see people and their diseases mainly as digital data, which can be stored, analysed, and then, if necessary, transmitted – whether by internet, telephone or radio – from one computer to another. He is one of those helping to create a new type of patient, and a new type of patient’s body – one much less human and tangible than those cared for by his medical predecessors. It is one stage further than reducing the body down to a damaged heart valve, an enlarged spleen or a diseased pair of lungs. For this ‘post-human’ body is one that exists mainly in an abstract, immaterial form. It is a body that has become pure information.

Now, as I have previously written:

One suspects that Dr A is something of a straw man, and by putting listening to the patient in opposition to other aspects of practice, I fear that Dr Helman may have been stretching things to make a rhetorical point (surely one can make use of technology in practice, even be something of a “techno-doctor”, and nevertheless put the patient’s story at the heart of practice?) Furthermore, in its own way a recourse to anthropology or literature to “explain” a patient’s story can be as distancing, as intellectualizing, as invoking physiology, biochemistry or the genome. At times the anthropological explanations seem pat, all too convenient – even reductionist.

… and re-reading this passage from Helman today, involved as I am with the CCIO , Dr A seems even more of a straw man (“horned rimmed spectacles” indeed!) – I haven’t seen much evidence that the CCIO, which is fair to say includes a fair few “technodoctors” as well as technonurses, technophysios and technoAHPs in general, is devoted to reducing the human to pure information. Indeed, the aim is to put the person at the centre of care.

 

And yet… Helman’s critique is an important one. The essential point he makes is valid and reminds us of a besetting temptation when it comes to introducing technology into care. It is very easy for the technology to drive the process, rather than clinical need. Building robust ways of preventing this is one of the challenges of the eHealth agenda. And at the core, keeping the richness of human experience at the centre of the interaction is key. Telemedicine is a tool which has some fairly strong advantages, especially in bringing specialty expertise to remoter areas. However there would be a considerable loss if it became the dominant mode of clinical interaction.  Again from my review of An Amazing Murmur of the Heart:

 

In increasingly overloaded medical curricula, where an ever-expanding amount of physiological knowledge vies for attention with fields such as health economics and statistics, the fact that medicine is ultimately an enterprise about a single relationship with one other person – the patient – can get lost. Helman discusses the wounded healer archetype, relating it to the shamanic tradition. He is eloquent on the accumulated impact of so many experiences, even at a professional remove, of disease and death: “as a doctor you can never forget. Over the years you become a palimpsest of thousands of painful, shocking memories, old and new, and they remain with you for as long as you live. Just out of sight, but ready to burst out again at any moment”.

Every sufficiently advanced little thing she does is indistinguishable from magic

This has been the longest hiatus on this blog so far, and  my last post on November 19th wasn’t exactly a deep meditation on anything.

I am hoping to re-invigorate things a little by successively blogging about three events I attended in the recent past – one last week, one the week before that, and one way back in October. Thinking about it I think this blog will increasingly become a platform for me to working out my thoughts on various matters relating to the intersection of technology and healthcare, medical education, and evidence-based practice/methodology questions. More general writing and “curation” of my old writing will appear on my other blog

On November 25th I attended another meeting of the CCIO, following on from the last one in September. The same caveat (“not only are these opinions not those of the CCIO, the HSE, or any other institution I may have links with, they are barely even those of myself.”) applies.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make the entire day so missed some of the morning session. I was fortunate enough to catch the talk by Robert Cooke , IT Delivery Director for Community Health, which encompasses my own professional area of mental health. As Robert said in his presentation infrastructure-wise particularly, mental health is starting from a low base for eHealth – and therefore infrastructure development is an important place to start.

As with pretty much all of the presentations I have seen at the CCIO Robert’s was particularly impressive in its blend of enthusiasm and a tough-minded realism about the size of the challenge. No one at these meetings is getting up and announcing that tech will magically sort out what ails healthcare. Indeed Robert strongly made the point that systems and processes need to be addressed before technology is applied, rather than waiting for it to be a magic bullet.

There were other very interesting presentations but the highlight was the breakaway group. In a relatively small group myself and three other CCIO members were facilitated in addressing  a) our vision for what eHealth could make the healthcare system look like in five years time, b) what barriers and enablers exist relating to this vision, and c) what would need to change. This exercise was part of the work UCD’s Applied Research in Connected Health team are doing on Ireland’s eHealth journey. As often happens, the discussion was so stimulating that we didn’t get to c) (and barely covered b) in time)

During the discussions about “the vision thing”, the famous Arthur C Clarke quote ““Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic” kept coming into my mind, along with a memory of a point about Assisted Living Technologies made by Jeffrey Soar at the International Psychogeriatric Association congress in Berlin (which I drafted a blog post on and hope to actually complete very shortly) – those assisted living technologies that are successful are unobtrusive, in the background, invisible.

So much was the Arthur C Clarke quote going round my mind I was impelled to tweet it:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” #ehealth4all

— Seamus MacSuibhne (@JamesMcQueen78) November 25, 2015

 

It turned out when I tweeted this that an extremely witty twist on the quote has already been minted:

Every sufficiently advanced little thing she does is indistinguishable from magic.

— Stan Carey (@StanCarey) February 23, 2015

So my vision for the future of healthcare is sitting in a room talking to someone, without a table or a barrier between us, with the appropriate information about that person in front of me (but not a bulky set of notes, or desktop computer, or distracting handheld device) in whatever form is more convivial to communication between us. We discuss whatever it is that has that person with me on that day, what they want from the interaction, what they want in the long term as well as the short term. In conversation we agree on a plan, if a “plan” is what emerges (perhaps, after all, the plan will be no plan) – perhaps referral onto others, perhaps certain investigations, perhaps changes to treatment. At the end, I am presented with a summary of this interaction and of the plan, prepared by a sufficiently advanced technology invisible during the interaction, which myself and the other person can agree on. And if so, the referrals happen, the investigations are ordered, and all the other things that now involve filling out carbon-copy forms and in one healthcare future will involve clicking through drop-down menus, just happen.

 

That’s it.