Sure, there’s lots of A.I. hype to talk about (e.g., the AI regulation proposed by Chuck Schumer, or the latest updates from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI) but a recent column by Wall Street Journal tech writer Christopher Mims – What I Got Wrong in a Decade of Predicting the Future of Tech -- reminded me how easily we get overexcited by such things.
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| The future? Maybe. Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay |
Mr. Mims
offers five key learnings:
- Disruption is overrated
- Human factors are everything
- We’re all susceptible to this one kind of tech B.S.
- Tech bubbles are useful even when they’re wasteful
- We’ve got more power than we think
Let’s take
each of these in turn and see how they relate not just to tech but also to
healthcare.
Disruption
is overrated
“It’s not that disruption never happens,” Mr. Mims clarifies.
“It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as we’ve been led to believe.” Well, no kidding. I’ve been in healthcare for
longer than I care to admit, and I’ve lost count of all the “disruptions” we
were promised.
The fact of the matter is that healthcare is a huge part of
the economy. Trillions of dollars are at stake, not to mention millions of jobs
and hundreds of billions of profits. Healthcare is too big to fail, and
possibly too big to disrupt in any meaningful way.
If some super genius came along and offered us a simple
solution that would radically improve our health but slash more than half of
that spending and most of those jobs, I honestly am not sure we’d take the
offer. Healthcare likes its disruption in manageable gulps, and disruptors
often have their eye more on their share of those trillions than in reducing
them.
For better or worse, change in healthcare usually comes in
small increments.
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| Yeah, most disruption is just talk. Credit: Eden Costantino on Unsplash |
“But what’s most often holding back mass adoption of a
technology is our humanity,” Mr. Mims points out. “The challenge of
getting people to change their ways is the reason that adoption of new tech is
always much slower than it would be if we were all coldly rational utilitarians
bent solely on maximizing our productivity or pleasure.”
Boy, this hits the healthcare head on the nail. If we all
simply ate better, exercised more, slept better, and spent less time on our
screens, our health and our healthcare system would be very different. It’s not
rocket science, but it is proven science.
But we don’t. We like our short-cuts, we don’t like personal inconvenience,
and why skip the Krispy Kreme when we can just take Wegovy? Figure out how to
motivate people to take more charge of their health: that’d be
disruption.
We’re
all susceptible to this one kind of tech B.S.
Mr. Mims
believes: “Tech is, to put it
bluntly, full of people lying to themselves,” although he is careful to add: “It’s
usually not malicious.” That’s true in healthcare as well. I’ve known many
healthcare innovators, and almost without exception they are true believers in
what they are proposing. The good ones get others to buy into their vision. The
great ones actually make some changes, albeit rarely quite as profoundly as
hoped.
But just because someone believes something strongly and articulates
very well doesn’t mean it’s true. I’d like to see significant changes as much
as anyone, and more than most, and I know I’m too often guilty of looking for what
Mr. Mims calls “the winning lottery ticket” when it comes to healthcare innovation,
even though I know the lottery is a sucker’s bet.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan (!), hope but verify.
Tech bubbles are useful even when they’re
wasteful
Healthcare has its
bubbles as well, many but not all of them tech related. How many health
start-ups over the last twenty years can you name that did not survive, much
less make a mark on the healthcare system? How many billions of investments do
they represent?
But, as Mr. Mims recounts Bill Gates once saying, “most
startups were “silly” and would go bankrupt, but that the handful of ideas—he
specifically said ideas, and not companies—that persist would later prove to be
“really important.”’
The trick,
in healthcare as in tech, is separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff,
both in terms of what ideas deserve to persist and in which
people/organizations can actually make them work. There are good new
ideas out there, some of which could be really important.
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| Finding the right idea matters. Credit: Bing Image Creator |
Many of us
feel helpless when encountering the healthcare system. It’s too big, too
complicated, too impersonal, and too full of specialized knowledge for us to
have the kind of agency we might like.
Mr. Mims
advice, when it comes to tech is: “Collectively,
we have agency over how new tech is developed, released, and used, and we’d be
foolish not to use it.” The same is true with healthcare. We can be the
patient patients our healthcare system has come to expect, or we can be the assertive
ones that it will have to deal with.
I think about people like Dave deBronkart or the late Casey Quinlan
when it comes to demanding our own data. I think about Andrea Downing and The Light Collective when it comes to
privacy rights. I think about all the biohackers who are not waiting for the
healthcare system to catch up on how to apply the latest tech to their health.
And I think about all those patient advocates – too numerous to name – who are
insisting on respect from the healthcare system and a meaningful role in
managing their health.
Yes, we’ve got way more power than we think. Use it.
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Mr. Mims is humble in admitting that he fell for some people,
ideas, gadgets, and services that perhaps he shouldn’t. The key thing he does, though,
to use his words, is “paying attention to what’s just over the horizon.”
We should all be trying to do that, and doing our best to prepare for it.
My horizon is what a 22nd century healthcare system could,
will and should look like. I’m not willing to settle for what our early 21st
century one does. I expect I’ll continue to get a lot wrong but I’m still going
to try.
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