What Healthcare Needs: Convergence Driven by Exponentially Growing Technologies

  by BRIAN KLEIN on Jun 22, 2012 • 11:27 am FutureMed executive director Daniel Kraft, MD kicked off Rock Health's second Demo Day last week in San Francisco by summarizing some of the most exciting developments that have the potential to improve medicine. Kraft, who is also the inventor of the MarrowMiner, started by looking "back to the future" at his residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at Mass General Hospital in Boston. Kraft had visited the hospital a number of months ago, some fifteen years after his residency, and realized that in many ways, not much had changed. One of the things that has remained the same is that medicine in practice is still siloed into different specialties. "We are not just a bucket of body parts," he said. "We are much more complex than that and we are in a new age." Although there are countless exciting medical innovations, when you look at the field as a whole, it has not seen the tremendous upheaval exemplified in other aspects of our lives. Over the course of the last decade or so, the way we pay for things, how we read and share the news, take and share photos, for instance, have been completely reinvented and reimagined. Healthcare would do well to follow this path and ride the exponentially accelerating technologies that have made such innovation based on convergence possible in other aspects of our lives, and, to a certain extent, it is doing that. But much more is possible. Another aspect of this convergence comes from people. "What is exciting about Rock Health in particular is that it has brought in all of these people who may have not initially been in healthcare and brought them into this really exciting era of convergence," Kraft said. Kraft then dove into a whirlwind summary of some of the recent developments that could ultimately have a big impact on medicine. Examples of these include: Another, as the cockpits have shifted from analog to digital, is the fact that pilots now have improved their ability to see data in context. "If you are a pilot, or a physician, or a patient, you want to see that data in context. You want that heads up display so you can see that information that is relevant to you." Kraft concluded his talk citing the need to find inspiration to harness such exciting technologies such as these to solve some of the big problems in healthcare. June 25, 2012