The Health Sector Needs Tech Giants

In "The Health Sector Needs Tech Giants," Carla Smith, executive vice president of HIMSS, a cause-based, not-for-profit focused on better health through IT seems to make the case that traditional healthcare players, such as pharma and life-sciences firms, providers and payers are going to be the ones to effect change while tech companies have been chary about getting involved due to all the regulatory hoops.

Everyone knows the health system is broken. Everyone knows that there are multiple barriers, including byzantine regulations, the vested interests that are part and parcel of big business, and inertia, of consumers as well as the big players in the healthcare industry. What I cannot understand is why people think the ones responsible for creating this mess are the ones to fix it. There is no incentive to kill the goose laying all those golden eggs. 

And, of course, she pulled out the example of Google Health to illustrate patient apathy and tech's failure to understand it.

I am so tired of seeing Google Health's failure held up as an example of user apathy about collecting their health data. The last reason Google Health failed was user apathy!

First of all, you had to know it actually existed. There was zero marketing. 99% of everyone I've asked, even in Silicon Valley, over the years never heard of it. Next, if you were able to locate it after clicking through multiple pages, you had to wade through an abysmally awful interface. The UX and UI were obviously the result of a something akin to a weekend hack and it was never improved. Even for those who were motivated to create a fully populated account, it was an exercise in tenacity and persistence to wade through it all. Most didn't. Then, it lost its champion when Eric Schmidt's responsibilities were redefined. Lastly, it was just too early.

I will agree that these intervening years have made a huge difference in people's attitudes, for multiple reasons. The general public is more educated about the awful death toll due to medical data errors, health identity theft, redundant tests. They're frustrated by the difficulty in obtaining copies of their own health data due to stone-walling medical practices that don't understand exactly what HIPAA says. Especially, Millennials are all about taking control of their health data, knowing it is current and correct, that it is portable, and that it enables a more collaborative relationship with healthcare professionals.

That being said, the established "healthcare industry" is more interested in protecting their interests than in enabling interoperability, transparency, portability, or even, data security. Why is it expected they will actually fix this broken system they've built that works so well for their bottom lines? Every 18 months or so a press release goes out announcing that all the big players have banded together to solve these problems with another study and then...crickets.

It is going to take scrappy entrepreneurs who are willing to do whatever it takes to disrupt the status quo and redefine how healthcare works. It is about putting the health consumer at the center of her/his health data, building the solutions, and then working like hell to get universal adoption of their disruptive technologies.

It seems there might very well be a disconnect, illustrated by discussion of 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' solutions to problems when in reality. We believe the thinking should be about 'middle-out' solutions that clearly benefit all parties. Those ventures with that frame of reference will be the tech giants that change the health sector.