Where's Our National Health Tech Academy?

It has been said that if your company has a Chief Innovation Officer or an Innovation Department, it’s probably not a very innovative company. To be successful, innovation has to be part of a company’s culture, embraced widely and practiced constantly. 

Similarly, if your company has a Chief Digital Officer, chances are “digital” is still seen as a novelty, an adjunct to the “real” work of the company. E.g., “digital health” isn’t going to have much effect on the healthcare system, or on the health those using it, until it’s a seamless part of that system and their lives.

Credit: Kavli Foundation

What got me thinking about this, oddly enough, was a report from the GAO as to the advisability of a Federal Academy – “similar to the military academies” - to develop digital expertise for government agencies.  As the GAO noted: “A talented and diverse cadre of digital-ready, tech-savvy federal employees is critical to a modern, efficient government.”

Boy, howdy; you could say that about employees in a “modern, efficient” healthcare system too.

The GAO convened a panel of technology experts from across the government, academia, and non-profit organizations to help evaluate the problem(s) and potential solutions. The panel identified a variety of short and long-term needs for digital expertise, including updating legacy systems, applying advanced technologies (e.g. AI), managing cybersecurity risks, and reimaging service delivery.

Again, any of those that do not apply to any healthcare organization?

Even if the government could attract the appropriate digital talent it needs, the GAO warned, it would still be subject to significant limitations, including FTE count restrictions, existing technology infrastructure, long term career pathways, ability to offer competitive compensation, and existing laws and regulation. Unless it’s a hot new digital health start-up, and perhaps even then, these apply to most healthcare organizations too.

Despite the “military academy” analogy, the GAO panel saw the digital service academy as perhaps better suited to a graduate level institution, “because agencies need staff with advanced skills in leading projects and programs, data curation, and digitalization.”  I.e., the National War College might be a better example than West Point (and, in fact, if its graduates were as accomplished and wide ranging as the War College’s, the Digital Academy would be doing well).  

Even with such a digital academy, the GAO recommended other actions were needed to further support the digital talent, such as ongoing training programs, relationships with academic institutions, and support networks, the latter in part because “the work of digital service staff may introduce changes that could be met with resistance from existing employees.” 

Been there, encountered that.

As much as our members of Congress universally proclaim their love for and admiration of the military academies, in today’s hyper-polarized political climate the odds that we’ll actually see the creation of such a Digital Service Academy seem dim, alas for us.   

Healthcare needs a better pipeline of digital, and more broadly technology, talent too. There are plenty of the usual suspects that could be candidates to train such expertise, starting with the nation’s medical schools (allopathic and osteopathic). We’ve got a lot of them, they attract very smart, motivated people, and physicians are certainly on the front-line of much of what happens in healthcare.

Credit: Stanford Medicine

The problem is, though, that they’re focused on teaching medicine, a task that has always been hard and which grows ever harder as the knowledgebase expands exponentially. Yes, some physicians are tech-savvy and many are innovative, but one suspects that this is as much despite their medical school experience as because of it.

Perhaps, then, schools of public health could be loci of digital/tech expertise. The pandemic should have taught us the great potential for digital solutions to public health problems – as well as the barriers to actually making them work.  The problem here is that, again, the pandemic has revealed to us how broken and fragmented our public health systems are, and how isolated they often are from the rest of the healthcare system. There shouldn’t be such separation, but there is.

If we’re looking for tech expertise and innovation bias, we need look no further than our business schools, especially those which offer specialization in healthcare. The problem with them is that graduates tend to come out of them with, you might say, business orientations. Healthcare is certainly a business, and a huge one at that, but if all we’re looking at are the business aspects of healthcare, we’re likely to be not happy with the healthcare system we get.

There is another candidate that might make sense. We do have a National Academy of Medicine after all, whose mission is: “To improve health for all by advancing science, accelerating health equity, and providing independent, authoritative, and trusted advice nationally and globally.”  Despite the “medicine” in the name and the preponderance of physicians among its members, it sees itself as “collaborative and interdisciplinary… across disciplines and domains to advance science, medicine, technology, and health.” 

So it might make sense that the NAM take on the challenge of helping train healthcare leaders in the new technologies that the 21^st has brought/will bring, and how they could be used to improve our healthcare system and our health.

A little over twenty years ago the NAM (in its former existence as the IOM) issued its landmark To Err Is Human report, with its startling estimate of 98,000 deaths due to medical errors and its assertion that “the problem is not bad people in health care--it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer.”  It’d be hard to argue that 2021 finds the healthcare system much safer, while it certainly has gotten much more complex.

What we need are not more reports but new generations of leaders, conversant with a broad range of 21^st century technologies and with a predilection towards action and innovation. It may not be the NAM that will train them, and it could be a Federal Academy, but what we are doing now is not going to suffice.

We badly need government employees who are tech-savvy and who can help modernize the outdated systems at every level of government. But, when it comes to that, the healthcare system should be looking at itself first.

The Kids Aren't Alright

America, like most cultures, claims to love and value children, but, gosh, the reality sure seems very different. Three recent reports help illustrate this: The Pew Research Center’s report on expectation of having children, Claire Suddath’s searing look at the childcare industry on Bloomberg, and a UNICEF survey about how young people, and their elders, view the future.   

It’s hard to say which is more depressing.

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Pew found that the percentage of non-parents under 50 who expect to have children jumped from 37% in 2018 to 44% in 2021. Current parents who don’t expect to have more children edged up slightly (71% to 74%). The main reason given by childless adults for not wanting children was simply not wanting children, cited by 56% of those not wanting children. Among those who gave a reason, medical and financial reasons were cited most often. Current parents were even more likely – 63% - to simply say they just didn’t want more.

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Earlier this year the Census Bureau reported that the birthrate in America dropped for the sixth consecutive year, the largest percentage one year drop since 1965 and the lowest absolute number of babies since 1979. It’d be easy to blame this on the pandemic, but, as sociologist Phillip N. Cohen told The Washington Post: “It’s a shock but not a change in direction.”

In many ways, having children seems like ignoring everything that’s going on. We have a climate change/global warming crisis that threatens to wreak havoc on human societies, we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic, and our political/cultural climate seems even more volatile than the actual climate. One Gen Xer told The New York Times: “As I think of it, having a child is like rolling dice with the child’s life in an increasingly uncertain world.”

Yikes.

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The mess that is America’s child care industry (nurseries, day care, preschool) may help explain why people are reluctant to have kids/more kids.  If you’ve had a child, or known people who have, you’ve heard the complaints about child care. It’s hard to find good ones, harder to get into them, and harder still to pay for them. The people who work in them are, for the most part, wonders, but there are too few of them and they’re woefully underpaid…despite how expensive the child care is.

Ms. Suddath writes: “Child care in the U.S. is the rare example of an almost entirely private market in which the service offered is too expensive for both consumers and the businesses that provide it.” She quotes Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen: “The free market works well in many different sectors, but child care is not one of them.”

At least in healthcare some people are making money.

Maria Fabrizio for NPR

The workers are paid less than they’d make at Amazon or Walmart, but, between staffing ratios and other regulatory requirements, the costs can approach college tuition levels. It keeps many women out of the workforce, hampering both their careers and our overall economic development. Even worse, lack of preschool has lifelong impacts on children’s development. She quotes Catherine Wolfram at the U.S. Treasury: “There’s very robust, strong economic literature that documents the positive effects of early childhood education. Educating kids has all these benefits for the rest of society.”

The Build Back Better Act is supposed to address some of the child care issues, such as limits on how much parents have to spend on it and improving wages for the workers, but Ms. Suddath warns, not so fast.  The bill is, she suggests, more aspirational than prescriptive:  

States can decide to take money for preschool but reject additional funds to subsidize other forms of child care. Or a state could call all this communism and do nothing.

Beyond that, there’s not a lot of detail in the bill. States have no guidance on how to help child-care businesses pay higher wages, for example.

Think all those Red states that have defied masks/vaccine mandates/Medicaid expansion are going to rush into fixing the child care problems?  

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The UNICEF survey, which included respondents from 21 countries, found that, overall, young people (15-24) thought children in their country would be better off than their parents – but, in the U.S., only 43% thought so, with 56% disagreeing. It could have been worse; the “worse off” percentages were worse in many other developed countries. The older respondents were even more pessimistic (64%).

Credit: UNICEF/Gallup/NYT

Laurence Chandy, the UNICEF official who oversaw the survey, said: “In a lot of the developing world, there is a bit more optimism that yes, with each generation our living standards are improving.  But there’s a recognition in the West that’s stopped happening.”  In point of fact, U.S. children born in 1980 or later are no longer likely to earn more than their parents, a startling reversal of the trends from 1940 to 1980. 

Young Americans still cite “hard work” as the key to success, but just narrowly edging out “Family wealth or connections,” which is in contrast to their elders, who are much more likely to still believe in hard work.  Education is a distant third.

We’re supposed to be the country where success is about getting a good education and working hard, not about who your family and friends are. We’re not that country anymore.

No wonder our young people are pessimistic about their futures.

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When it comes to children’s health, of course, the U.S. should hang its head. We have too many children in poverty, too many children going hungry, too many children without health insurance. Our infant (and maternal) mortality rates are positively third world. Compared to other developed countries, our kids are too overweight, too likely to have diabetes, too likely to get pregnant, too likely to use illegal drugs.

We have some of the best children’s hospitals in the world, but we pay pediatricians lower than any other physician specialty, and, as a result, have a shortage. It’s similar to those child care workers or elementary school teachers: we say we want the best for our children, but we don’t seem to be willing to pay for the best. And it shows.

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I wish I had some good news. I wish I had some solutions. When I look at the young people in my life I admire their spirit, but I fear for their futures. Why politicians fight things like universal preschool, affordable childcare, or paid family leave – each of which is undeniably good for children – I’m at a loss.

We can do better for our children. We must.

Breaking Up Is Good to Do

Last week General Electric announced it was breaking itself up. GE is an American icon, part of America’s industrial landscape for the last 129 years, but the 21^st century has not been kind to it. The breakup didn’t come as a complete surprise. Then later in the week Johnson and Johnson, another longtime American icon, also announced it would split itself up, and I thought, well, that’s interesting. When on the same day Toshiba said it was splitting itself up, I thought, hmm, I may have to write about this.

Credit: AFP

Healthcare is still in the consolidation phase, but there may be some lessons here for it.

Credit: Quartz

For most of its existence, GE was an acquirer, gobbling up companies with the belief that its vaunted management structure could provide value no matter what the industry. This was most famously true in the Jack Welch days, but since those days it has been gradually shrinking itself, spinning off some of its more problematic divisions, like appliances, locomotives, and much of its once-huge financial services business. It will spin off its healthcare business in early 2023 and its renewable energy and power business in early 2024; its aviation business will keep the GE name.

“A healthcare investor wants to invest in healthcare,” CEO Larry Culp explained. “We know we are under-owned in each of those three sectors, in part because of our structure.”

Mr. Culp told The Wall Street Journal, “It was not necessarily a time for grand plans. We needed to get the balance sheet squared away and get back to basics operationally.” Scott Davis, chief executive of Melius Research, was not so kind, telling The New York Times: “G.E. got caught in the past — and now it’s the end, it’s over.” In The Washington Post, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities called it “a sign of the times in this new digital world.”

J&J had a different challenge: selling pharmaceuticals and medical devices is just much more profitable than selling Band-Aids and Tylenol. To reflect that, it is splitting into one company to sell the former two types of products and a consumer products company for the rest. The former company will retain the Johnson & Johnson name.

Credit: Yahoo Finance

“Doctors and hospitals just want hips and knees, and drugs that work, at a cheap price. They’re not really thinking of Band-Aids,” investor/analyst Les Funtleyder told The New York Times.

Toshiba’s story is perhaps somewhat different. It had been dealing with the fallout from a major accounting scandal for several years, some failed takeover bids, and (separate) ousters of its CEO and its Chairman. It is spinning off its energy and infrastructure unit and its device and storage operation, and will retain the Toshiba name for its 40% stake in Kioxia, the flash memory company it spun off in 2018, as well as some other assets. 

The Toshiba breakup is believed to be the first such split by a Japanese company. Toshiba had often been compared to GE, and was even older than GE, but CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa now stresses: "We are no longer an industrial conglomerate. Our strength is in infrastructure, energy and semiconductors. The reorganization is an evolution toward the future."

As unique as each of their stories is, the thing that each breakup has in common is that the hope is that investors will see greater value as a result. It’s not about the products or the customers; it’s about the returns.

Healthcare knows about that.

Credit: Modern Healthcare/Getty Images

Healthcare has been a hotbed of acquisition and consolidation. Hospitals buy hospitals; health insurers buy health insurers, pharmaceutical companies buy pharmaceutical companies, digital health companies buy digital health companies, private equity firms buy physician practices. But we’re also seeing things like CVS buying Aetna or UnitedHealth Group buying DaVita Medical Group (and trying to buy Change Healthcare). 

This is not really for “our” benefit. I mean, does anyone really think either their pharmacy or their health insurance experiences are better since CVS took over Aetna? Can anyone really explain all the things Optum now does? Are ever-bigger pharmaceutical companies really going to produce more innovation or lower drug prices?

Still, though, when I see conglomerates like GE, J&J, or Toshiba breaking up, what I think about most are not those kinds of healthcare conglomerates, but, rather, hospitals.

Hospital systems are big. It probably won’t come as much surprise that a for-profit chain like HCA has annual revenues of $59b, but it might that “non-profit” UPMC has annual revenues of $23b.  Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic also report double digit billion dollar revenues. We’re talking about big businesses.

No, that's not a city, it's the Texas Medical Center

But are hospitals anything other than healthcare conglomerates? They fix your heart over here, they implant a new hip over there, they deliver your babies, they attack a variety of your cancers in a variety of ways, they put various kinds of scopes inside you, they take detailed images of you, and, Lord knows, they do all sorts of lab tests, all while running the meter on you to ensure they can charge you as much as they are allowed.

I can see the argument that you’ll need imaging and lab tests whether you are getting a bypass or having a baby, but it is not at all clear that doing bypasses makes a hospital a better place to deliver babies. Being the best cancer hospital, or even just a good cancer hospital, doesn’t mean it is good at doing a cholecystectomy. Service lines are businesses; it’s hard enough to ensure quality within a service line, much less across them. More isn’t necessarily better.

Michael Farr, head of Farr, Miller & Washington, told WaPo: “More effective CEOs said, ‘Wait a minute, I need to make sure this is strategically and logically integrated with everything our core business is doing.’”  He was speaking of the GE divestiture, but how many hospital CEOs are having that same examination? How many of them could truly define their “core business,” other than offering a bland “patient care”? Which patients, which care, in what places using what services?

Increasingly, hospitals want to be all things to all patients in all places, just as industrial conglomerates wanted to serve all customers in all industries. That worked well for a long time, but no longer. That time is coming in healthcare too. Hospitals, and all healthcare companies, need to truly define, and focus on, their core business.

Healthcare has too many conglomerates. Time for them to break up.

Tech Can't Fix the Problems in Healthcare

Shira Ovide, who writes the On Tech newsletter for The New York Times, had a thoughtful column last week: Tech Can’t Fix the Problem of Cars.  It was, she said, inspired by Peter Norton’s Autonorama: The Illusionary Promise of High Tech Driving.  The premise of both, in case the titles didn’t already give it away, is that throwing more tech into our cars is not going to address the underlying issues that cars pose.

It made me think of healthcare.

Credit: HealthcareITNews

What’s been going on in the automotive world in the past decade has truly been amazing. Our cars have become mobile screens, with big dashboard touchscreen displays, Bluetooth, and streaming. Electric cars have gone from an expensive pipedream to an agreed-upon future, with Tesla valued at over a trillion dollars, despite never having sold a half million cars annually before 2021.

Credit: chombosan/Getty

If we don’t feel like driving, we can use our smartphones to call an Uber or Lyft. Or we can use the various autonomous features already available on many cars, with an expectation that full self-driving vehicles are right around the corner. Soon, it seems, we’ll have non-polluting, self-driving vehicles on call: fewer deaths/injuries, less pollution, not as many vehicles sitting around idly most of the day. Utopia, right?

This is what Ms. Ovide and Dr. Norton are questioning. Ms. Ovide says: “There’s also a risk that devoting our attention to these technological marvels may give us a pass from confronting a deeper question: How can we make our lives less dependent on cars?”

Making it cheaper, safer, and more convenient to hop in a car, their argument goes, might very likely just make us drive more miles (just as adding/expanding highways has proved to induce demand instead of relieving congestion). 

Ms. Ovide describes some of Dr. Norton’s arguments:

But Dr. Norton also said that it would be useful to redirect money and attention to make walking, cycling and using shared transportation more affordable and appealing choices.

Dr. Norton asked us to imagine what would happen if a fraction of the bonkers dollars being spent to develop driverless cars were invested in unflashy products and policy changes.

She concludes: “We know that technology improves our lives. But we also know that belief in the promise of technology sometimes turns us away from confronting the root causes of our problems.”

So it is with healthcare.

Money is flowing into digital health in ways that make the housing market look rational. Every day there are new investment rounds valuing digital health companies you’ve never heard of, and that few of us could distinguish, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Healthcare, the belief must be, is going to be more digital; we don’t really know exactly how or when, but safer to cover all the bets.

Meanwhile, the big healthcare systems and the big health payors are getting bigger, each gobbling up competitors and new tech-based entrants at ways that Big Tech would recognize. These days, if you’re in healthcare and someone isn’t acquiring or investing in you, you’re doing something wrong.

But, as was pointed out about cars, tech isn’t going to solve the many, many problems that healthcare has. As Nick van Terheyden, MD, tweeted last week:

If you work in healthcare, you know the kind of systemic problems he’s referring to. If you have ever received healthcare, or known anyone who has, you also have probably seen some of them. And if you have the “wrong” insurance status, gender, race/ethnicity, or location, you have undoubtedly experienced them. 

To call our healthcare system a “system” is to overstate the case; it doesn’t work anything like a system. For many people, it doesn’t work at all. It evolved from something smaller, something simpler, and, like evolution generally, it has lots of kludges that are serve no evident or useful purpose. The goal of evolution is, after all, survival into the next generation, not efficiency, elegance, or equity.

Recently, Rasu Shrestha, MD, quoted Atrium Health’s Geoffrey Rose, MD: "A system that needs a navigator, is a system that needs to be redesigned." What we’re doing in healthcare is adding more and more navigators, especially tech-based ones, instead of redesigning the system.

We can add all the tech we want – and healthcare should have much, much better technology – but that doesn’t necessarily mean people without insurance (or with low-paying insurance like Medicaid) will get the same care. We can apply artificial intelligence and Big Data to many healthcare problems, but, unless we are very careful and very purposeful, that doesn’t mean women or people of color will get the same care, with the same outcomes, as white men. We can build lots of beautiful new buildings but that doesn’t mean the care in those buildings is going to be of the same quality as in the places with the best care.

Even if we gave everyone all the healthcare we could, that doesn’t mean our health would be what it should/could be. If there’s one lesson our healthcare system continues to ignore, medicine is not the same as health. The now-familiar SDoH graphic suggests that only around 20% of our health results from the healthcare we receive.

Dr. Norton wants us to invest in “unflashy products and policy changes,” like zoning changes that encourage us to walk more instead of driving. Similar unflashy products and policy changes would get a bigger bang for our buck than most of our healthcare spending. How do we eat better, get more exercise, have cleaner water and air, etc.?

We’ve built our cities – and our suburbs, and our interstates -- around cars (not to mention our parking lots!). Our lifestyles depend on easy access to them. We’re going to see electric cars, autonomous cars, on-demand cars, but unless we rethink our basic attitudes towards driving, we’re not going to achieve the results that we’re hoping for.

The same is true with healthcare. I love technology as much as anyone and am excited about how new technologies can apply to healthcare, but let’s be clear: technology alone is not going to solve the basic problems our healthcare system has.

Ask the people at Building H or Cityblock how they suggest we might go about solving them. Our health is about our lives, not our health care, and so should our healthcare system.

Quantum Computing's Sputnik Moment

General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently expressed grave concern about China’s reported test of a hypersonic missile: “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. It has all of our attention.”  Maybe it should be, but General Milley may have missed the real 21^st century version of a Sputnik moment: China has claimed huge breakthroughs in quantum computing. 

It’s inside baseball to those of us who are neither computer experts nor quantum physicists, but let’s put it this way: the countries/companies that dominate quantum computing will dominate, full stop.  Healthcare included. 

I won’t pretend to understand quantum computers or try to explain how they work, but they’re to “traditional” computers as those computers are to, say, a calculator, or to an abacus.  They’re much faster – like a quantum leap faster – and can quickly do computations that would take even traditional supercomputers centuries to complete, if ever.  For example, think you’ve got an unbreakable code?  Unless you’ve got the fastest quantum computer, think again. 

China's photon quantum computer.  Credit: Hansen Zhong

The Global Times reported that a Chinese research team had achieved a 66-qubit programmable superconducting quantum computing system that is 10 million times faster than the fastest supercomputer and more than a million times faster than the previous fastest quantum computer, Google’s Sycamore.  And, oh-by-the-way, China has a second quantum computer that uses photons (light) instead of electricity, and that is “1 septillion times faster than the world's fastest existing supercomputer,” according to the Xinhua News Agency. 

Hey, look, there’s a hypersonic missile over there!

Skeptics quibble over the speed comparisons – much depends on the problem and how the computers are programmed – but, as IFLScience wrote:” …with regards to sampling problems, it appears quantum computers are finally significantly better than conventional options.”   Bill Fefferman, a University of Chicago computer science professor, told ZDNet: “Early experiments hint that this technology will hold the promise to solve very interesting problems that cannot be solved classically.”

It’s not like Google is resting on its laurels.  This summer it used Sycamore to create “time crystals,” a new form of matter that appears to not obey the second law of thermodynamics (i.e. entropy always wins).  What this means for quantum computing, or for physics more generally, isn’t yet clear, but it’s a big breakthrough.  

AWS Center for Quantum Computing at Caltech.  Credit: AWS

Meanwhile, Amazon and Caltech are partnering to establish a new branch of the AWS Center for Quantum Computing on the Caltech campus.  The shared goal is “is to create quantum computers and related technologies that have the potential to revolutionize data security, machine learning, medicine development, sustainability practices, and more.”  It’s the first such corporate partnership for Caltech. 

Caltech professor Oskar Painter, who also heads quantum hardware at AWS, stresses that these are still early days for quantum computers: "If we were to just take today's ideas and go forward with them, we would create a dinosaur of a quantum computer.”  Fellow Caltech professor Fernando Brandão, who also heads up quantum algorithms at AWS, says: “There's a new paradigm in computing.  It's not just about making our current computers a little bit faster or a little bit better as we have been seeing in the last 50 years at least. It's about building a completely new kind of computer.”

Nadia Carlsten, head of Product for the AWS Center, is looking for, shall I say, quantum breakthroughs: “The quantum algorithms that have the most potential for significant impact, for example in industries like manufacturing or pharmaceuticals, can’t be solved by simply expanding today’s quantum technologies.”

IBM has also made quantum computing a major focus, stating that quantum computing “is on the verge of sparking a paradigm shift.”    Microsoft and Intel are also betting big on quantum computing, as are more specialized companies like Cambridge Quantum Computing, D-Wave, and Rigetti Computing.   

Healthcare is a big reason why.  Read any article about the potential impact of quantum computing and healthcare is always listed as one of the top two or three sectors it will impact (the military, of course, is another common one).  For example, the AWS announcement referenced “medicine development,” ZDNet just published “Eight ways quantum computing is going to change the world” that listed “Discovering new drugs” as #1. 

Credit: Cambridge Quantum Computing

The article notes: “Quantum computers, however, have the potential to one day resolve the molecular simulation problem in minutes… This would mean that life-saving drugs, which currently take an average 10 years to reach the market, could be designed faster -- and much more cost-efficiently.”

David Cowan, one of the major investors in Rigetti, explained to Forbes’ Kevin Dowd why he was so keen on quantum computing: “I mean, simply put, curing cancer.” 

Mr. Dowd goes on to elaborate:

Perhaps the most exciting applications of quantum computing are in medicine. There are trillions of atoms in each cell and trillions of cells in the human body, all interacting with each other in an unceasing biological dance. Current superconductors are seriously powerful machines, but unspooling that kind of choreography is beyond their reach.

This is not going to happen overnight.  Quantum computers are not quite stable, not quite flexible, not quite available.  Your local hospital or physician group probably has more immediate concerns.  One hospital CIO told Becker’s Hospital Review: “I expect it will likely take another 3 to 5 years of innovation in hardware and subsequent applications to develop a quantum computing ecosystem that can truly benefit the healthcare industry.”

That is probably a safe bet, but changing to a new technology in 3 to 5 years means that most health organizations would have needed to start looking it 3 to 5 years ago.  It’s a safe bet that the big health insurers, and huge health systems like The Mayo Clinic or The Cleveland Clinic, are already thinking about it. 

If you believe that Big Data, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, internet of things, or confidentiality of patient records are going to be important in healthcare – and I certainly do – then quantum computing is going to be important as well.  That “internet” you think you know and rely on now?  We may be in early days of quantum computers, but people are already working on the “quantum internet.”

The world is going to change, and quantum computing is going to make possible many of the things that are going to change it.   Healthcare should take the latest developments as a Sputnik moment.