State of the art medical care usually comes with a high price tag, a reality that is fully palpable in the U.S. and starting to manifest itself in other parts of the world. A recent McKinsey Quarterly report estimates that healthcare spending in Japan can double as a proportion of their GDP in the next 30 years, mainly due to advances in medical technologies and the increasing purchasing power of healthcare consumers. In his recent book Crisis of Abundance, economist Arnold Kling describes dependence on high tech medicine as “premium medicine,” which he accuses of utilizing too much physical capital (such as MRI machines) and human capital (such as specialists). He also believes that premium medicine has created a cultural phenomenon that expects a high level of effort to diagnose diseases. That’s probably part of the reason too many people with a headache in the ER get a CT scan (the rest is physicians’ fear of lawsuits promoting the practice of defensive medicine).

It is interesting to note that most recent technological advances in medicine have been for diagnostic or procedural applications and physicians have done a great job adopting them. When used appropriately, these tools can be of great value but when it comes to managing the most important health problems of modern societies, i.e. chronic diseases, innovative solutions are almost nonexistent. Patients lack smart tools to help them manage their chronic diseases. A bluetooth enabled glucometer that allows wireless transmission of blood glucose readings to a central web-based database via a cell phone is good start but it becomes useless if the physician has no way of integrating the data into their medical documentation platform (8.5×11 sheets of paper in most cases) without disrupting their workflow. So patients are likely to continue to give their physicians coffee-stained blood glucose diaries with missing dates and pages.

Perhaps our best efforts can encourage investments in technologies that empower patients to better manage their chronic diseases in partnership and close collaboration with their primary care physician, who should also be enabled with tools that seamlessly integrate data collected from patients into an intuitively-designed electronic platform where every piece of data is meaningful and in its appropriate context.

Premium dollars going into designing novel methods of delivering healthcare services for the management of chronic diseases can substantially reduce the much larger spending on “premium medicine,” which in many cases comes into play when barriers to delivering quality care leave a diabetic patient with early heart disease and a trail of expensive diagnostic, therapeutic, and pharmacologic expectations.

More info: Crisis of Abundance, McKinsey Quarterly Report
Artwork: Francesco Clemente

Filed under: Innovation