Subscribe if you want to be notified of new blog posts. You will receive an email confirming your subscription.
Appliance or Application? The Choice Finally is Coming to Health Care.
My wife Jill loves her iPhone…she raves about it. Last night she showed me an application she had recently acquired for her iPhone. She was able to explain and demonstrate the app and its functionality to me (yes, to ME!) in about 30 seconds.
I’d describe the app as Garmin-like but running on the iPhone. You type in the address at which you’re going to start your drive and then you type in the address of the location where you want to drive to. The iPhone displays a map and step-by-step directions. Want to zoom in on a section of the map? …just put your fingers on the screen, spread them, and instantly you see the map in greater detail. The app uses the GPS built into the iPhone to display your current location and progress on the map.
A few years ago you would have had to purchase a separate Garmin or Garmin-like appliance to get this type of functionality. Is this iPhone app as good as the Garmin? For many people, the answer might well be “No”, but that’s not the point. For many people the iPhone app WILL be good enough — and having that choice is what creates a vibrant marketplace.
So what does this have to do with health care? A lot.
To date, health care has not had an iPhone like platform on which to run multiple high value applications. If you wanted specific functionality, you had to buy an independent appliance. For more on the appliance vs. platform distinction, start reading at Chapter 2 of Harvard Law Prof. Jonathan Zittrain’s excellent (and freely available) book, The Future of the Internet and How to Avoid It.
If you rethink health care, just about ANY technology or service can be reconceptualized as an app that COULD run on a common platform. Mull this over for a while…
Let’s take remote patient monitoring (RPM) as an example. In the past if you want to provide RPM for your patients, you have to buy a separate, non-interoperable appliance (hardware + software) to get this type of functionality.
Tomorrow, thanks to the HITECH Act and to the foresight of how Dr. Blumenthal and staff are implementing the legislation, a common health IT platform will be available on which you can buy interoperable RPM apps. The details have yet to be worked out, but the vision is clear.
Appliance or application? Finally we’ll have a choice.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Feel free to republish this post with attribution.
Appliance or Application? The Choice Finally is Coming to Health Care. http://bit.ly/cGe5Qo #healthit #hitpol
RT @VinceKuraitis: Appliance or Application? The Choice Finally is Coming to Health Care. http://bit.ly/cGe5Qo #healthit #hitpol
Exciting news! Appliance or Application? The Choice Finally is Coming to Health Care. by @VinceKuraitis http://bit.ly/aRLqpg
RT @leonardkish @VinceKuraitis Appliance or Application? The Choice Finally is Coming to #HealthCare http://bit.ly/aRLqpg #hit
Appliance or Application? The Choice Finally is Coming to Health Care. | e-CareManagement http://bit.ly/9kKb2P
This is insightful and could be a great boon to improving care and health.
However, we should be aware of the perverse incentives in our current financing system.
This can be illustrated by the case of the text to speech computers provided by Medicare. They are standard computers with rather mediocre text to speech software. However, “the rules” state that they must not be usable as a regular computer. The result is that they cost approx $5000.00 instead of $500.00 and they have software installed which prevents them from doing anything other than text to speech.
The people who sell these computers are happy since they are making big profits but patients and the taxpayer suffer.
Once something is identified as a medical device, it is captured by the insurance-industrial complex to ensure that they wring out maximum profit (at our expense) and make sure that there are “rules” to prevent us from freely using the device… and to keep the high priests in control. They just keep telling us to “ignore that man behind the curtain.”
The same argument for applications on a general purpose device would hold for other generic platforms (touchpad like systems as iPad and competitors and even laptops) under the condition that the applications can run safely and securely (protected against other applications) and ideally some certification to indicate the quality of the applications.
@VinceKuraitis Anything every happen with this health technology platform idea? http://bit.ly/d5BKYg