August - 20198In My OpinionHEALTHCARE AS IT COULD BE IN 2030As a Chief Information Officer, I spend the bulk of my management time in the real world of I.T. costs, suppliers, business planning, operations improvement, projects, human dynamics and, of course, risk management and cybersecurity. I expect that is true for most of my peers as well.Achieving alignment of evolving business strategies with the power and delivery of information technology is typically the premier attribute looked for in senior I.T. leaders. So strategic thinking is not rare in healthcare or in healthcare I.T. leadership. In fact, just the opposite--it's to be expected.Thus, this is not intended as strategy. Rather, it's about possibility; perhaps even inevitability. It's more about where the ceaseless pace of technology innovation might carry us as an industry and a society.I am trying to be more realistic than futuristic. To do that, I propose picking a future date and working backwards to observe the present as past and view trends at work today as their logical end state. The date is 2030. Why 2030? You will see as you read on."Looking back at our healthcare journey since that long ago day in 2017 when much younger versions of ourselves met to imagine the future--it's clear that we got some things right and others... well, let's just say our glasses were a bit out of focus.By the way, remember glasses? Contact lenses? Laser refractive surgery, with all the necessary adjustments for night-vision, halo effects and reading or distance limitations? Ophthalmology was just one of hundreds of practices that were changed completely by our new found ability to alter the DNA blueprint.We could make a long list. But all those old techniques now seem so crude, so invasive, and with so many negative side effects compared to treatments we have today.Looking back, it seems Bill Gates, famous for making personal computers part of daily life, was right when he said, "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10."With our vision clouded by that temporal myopia, we wrongly obsessed over costs, treatments and single instances of care. We placed too much faith in pharmaceutical chemistry and machine-guided procedures, as if they alone were the means of disrupting old, inefficient and mostly manual care processes.Those advances did occur, and their impacts were realized. But the total effect was limited to those expensive acute care conditions of greatest frequency.Alan V. Abramson, Ph.D. SVP of Information Services & Technology and CIO, HealthPartnersBy
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