Healthcare is very different from most other industries. It is fragmented, conservative, highly regulated, and hierarchical. It doesn’t follow most of the usual business rules around supply and demand or consumerism. An important aspect of my role at Microsoft is helping my colleagues at the company understand the many ways that healthcare is different from other “businesses”.
Healthcare is very different from most other industries. It is fragmented, conservative, highly regulated, and hierarchical. It doesn’t follow most of the usual business rules around supply and demand or consumerism. An important aspect of my role at Microsoft is helping my colleagues at the company understand the many ways that healthcare is different from other “businesses”.
I sometimes wake up in the morning and think, “If only my clinical colleagues could avail themselves of similar tools and technologies how different could
In my heart I know it is not totally as bleak as it seems sometimes. I could cite numerous examples of hospitals, health systems and clinics around the world that are using our latest technologies to improve health and healthcare delivery. I am well aware of the forces in retail health, specialty and concierge medicine, travel health, tele-health, mobile apps, wearable devices, sensors, remote monitoring, population health and health reform that are disrupting, and will continue to disrupt business as usual in the industry. That disruption can’t happen soon enough, although making significant changes to an industry as large and complicated as healthcare doesn’t happen overnight.
While we wait, I just want clinicians, managers, healthcare executives, and others who work in the healthcare industry to know that there are some readily available technologies that, even today, can significantly improve the way clinicians do their work and healthcare is delivered.