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".
Sign-up for my newsletter to get early and exclusive access to material that I don't write about elsewhere.
All in Technology
If you throw a pebble today, it's likely to land on an article that talks about how artificial intelligence and its brother machine learning are changing healthcare.
Yes, I get it broadly. But I was curious to explore how exactly healthcare's trends are shaping any one medical specialty.
Instead of waiting for a machine to come after you, it’s better that you steadily kill your job yourself. And invite the machine to takeover.
Here's the premise.
36 million American patients miss their medical appointments. If only they had a ride waiting outside, they'd make it to the doctor's office.
Have you noticed? That opportunities seem to chase some. But for several others...they spend their time chasing opportunities.
When or how does this happen?
Two years ago, Practice Fusion, an electronics health record company was rumored to be valued at more than a billion dollars.
Last month, the company sold for a fire sale price of $100 million.
Just out of curiosity, I searched Google News for these three words: artificial intelligence investments.
Here's what came up.
Whether you are IBM Watson or some other AI system, you seek to find answers to questions. That humans can't answer quickly or analytically.
When we ask cognitive (thinking) questions, there's a big underlying assumption. That the data we feed into the AI system is reliable. But is it?
In a recent health-tech class for doctors, we did an experiment. We made them into app designers. In about 30 minutes.
I'll tell you how.
It was exciting to see Dr. G at work. Patient after patient. Using our baby to go about his day. Yes, we had made life easy through our product. Innovated where it mattered.
Last week, I was teaching health IT to clinicians in Mthatha, South Africa. Interventional cardiologists. Pulmonologists. Psychiatrists. Family physicians. Surgeons. Orthopedic doctors. More.
Digging a well in many places never yields water. You’ll only end up with a hole here and a hole there. Never going deep enough.
Amazon's secretive team is called 1492. The year Columbus entered America. Team 1492 supposedly is working on legacy electronic medical records and telemedicine.
It's easy to imagine a future when your phone knows you more than your doctor. It's also not difficult to foresee the future of healthcare's challenges.
The healthcare industry is different. Full of dichotomies.
