I'm Praveen Suthrum. After 16+ years of building and running NextServices, a healthcare technology/management company, the challenges and opportunities in the industry leap out at me. I also get early access to industry trends and changes.
Whether you are seeking to start or grow your healthcare business, my weekly insights will make you spot opportunities and stay on top of your game. It'll help you think differently about healthcare.
Two ways people consistently describe what I write:
"insightful" and "thought-provoking".
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All in Healthcare
It was in February 1968 that The Beatles stayed at an ashram in Rishikesh to learn Transcendental Meditation. The retreat is at the foothills of the Himalayas, across the river Ganges. Today it's totally abandoned. In ruins. Part of a jungle.
Sitting inside John Lennon's dilapidated stone cottage last summer, I stared at chunky yellow-black graffiti: When you look up at the sky and see a cloud think of me - Lennon to Yoko.
The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.
It's true.
Science fiction writer William Gibson said that right. We simply have to look around enough - now - to find out what the future holds.
The future may never be evenly distributed. But it's surely becoming the present faster.
Since 2009, US spent $27 billion to digitize medical records. The cornerstone of digitization is to make health records available for patient care when needed.
In other words, the objective is to make electronic health records interoperable. This means, developing systems using common standards so that information can be exchanged without difficulty.
There's always something new to worry about for the healthcare industry.
On Jan 1st, 2017, a new law to track physician performance went into first gear. It's called MACRA - a law that could be as important as the Affordable Care Act, which led to the name Obamacare.
I love what I do. I hate what I have to do.
It's a quote that doctors attribute to their profession behind closed doors. As patients, we are so overwhelmed with our own problems. We fail to notice that our doctor may be battling her own problems with a complicated system.
But what do we care? Our meeting with the doctor is a paid transaction. We are owed our money's due. Empathy can take a backseat.
As I reflect on what I learnt in 2016, I see two somewhat conflicting world-views of health: upgrading and moderating.
One promotes upgrading the human body much like software. In this case, our biological processes can be considered as algorithms that can be improved upon. The other view calls for moderating our dependence on medicine by influencing elements surrounding health, such as food and environment.
Let’s consider both views.
It's easy to get excited about technological advances such as nanobots that swim in blood to deliver drugs or 3D printers that print human tissues or contact lens that detect glucose levels. However, in our enthusiasm to find the next fix, we are failing to notice the ground slipping underneath the healthcare industry.
During one summer in the southeast of US, I shadowed a doctor who was treating an obese woman in her early 50s. She was out from a colonoscopy that also involved removing a piece of chicken that was stuck in her gut.
Before the invention of the stethoscope, doctors routinely laid their ears on chests of patients to check how they were doing. Homemade concoctions, essentially placebos, often made people feel better. Doctors visited homes of patients who would later pay them whatever they could afford.
In country after country, I witness the same sad situation: caring, often-brilliant men and women toil in the healthcare industry to care for others, but to do so they must battle the system itself. That system has lost sight of what matters, which is humans caring for other human beings.
I loved Google Labs, an online site where you could stop by and test drive the company's latest projects and innovations. Google discontinued it in 2011. In fact, I found this list of discontinued Google products and counted more than 75.
My work takes me from affluent cities to rural areas where the poorest of the poor live. From the United States to India, South Africa and across the Middle East, I’ve observed that there are basically four reasons why people get sick (and others don’t).
It’s more complicated to create an engaging app than many business managers expect, especially in healthcare, one of the most complex industries. There are often different, opposing forces at work that make the task more challenging.
Just as with Mobile and Wearables, we are at the cusp of yet another technology becoming a big part of our daily lives. Revolutionary technology cooks for a long time in research labs, starting in spurts before finally taking the leap mainstream. After its long journey from the days of the Sensorama in the 1950s, Virtual Reality (VR) is ready to get real.
