Technology innovations have made it possible for consumers to use portable devices to access their medical information, monitor their vital signs, take tests at home and carry out a wide range of tasks., Serval articles and books by cardiologist, geneticist and researcher, describes how medicine is entering an age of democratization as power shifts from hospitals, doctors and other caregivers to patients, potentially leading to dramatic health care improvements.
By the intensive infiltration of digital devices into our daily lives, we have radically altered how we communicate with one another and with our entire social network at once. Everywhere we go, we take pictures and videos with our cellphone, the one precious object that never leaves our side. Forget about going to a video store to rent a movie and finding out it is not in stock. Just download it at home and watch it on television, a computer monitor, a tablet or even your phone. The Web lets us sample nearly all books in print without even making a purchase and efficiently download the whole book in a flash. Our lives have been radically transformed through digital innovation. Radically transformed. Creatively destroyed.
But the most precious part of our existence – our health – has thus far been largely unaffected, insulated and almost compartmentalized from this digital revolution. How could this be? Medicine is remarkably conservative to the point of being properly characterized as sclerotic, even ossified. Beyond the reluctance and resistance of physicians to change, the life science industry (companies that develop and commercialize drugs, devices or diagnostic tests) and government regulatory agencies are in a near-paralyzed state, unable to break out of a broken model determining how their products are developed or commercially approved. But that is about to change. Medicine is about to go through its biggest shakeup in history.
References:
Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
Impact of Health Information Technology on Quality, Efficiency, and Costs of Medical Care
H. B. Henderson Group Blog 