Healthcare’s resistance to change

 

"The next ˜big thing" in healthcare . . . . is IT, which will dramatically change the way health professionals interact with patients. Every step of a patient's care will be determined by protocols on a hand-held device. This will make healthcare safer and shift many hospital activities into the home," says Dr Devi Shetty, world-renowned heart surgeon, founder and chairman of Narayana Health, India's largest multi-purpose hospital group and the person said to have, "the biggest impact on healthcare on the 21st century".

Shetty also warns that, "Despite the advantages of such technologies, the medical community is reluctant to accept them."

Although doctors and patients have iPads and smartphones and use social networks, the healthcare community, "fights like mad to resist change", and fails to embrace life-saving technologies, which would improve patient care and reduce costs. ld improve patient care and reduce costs.
 
Open systems
In 2012 UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt issued a Mandate that by 2015, modern communications technology would play a substantially bigger role in the UK's healthcare system. The NHS remains a near bankrupt, inward looking public monopoly driven by proprietary systems rather than customer needs.

 

Saving lives didn't invoke change
Healthcare professionals invariably refer to privacy and security issues to protect the status quo, but these are equally applicable to other sectors, such financial services, which have embraced change and open standards.
 
An explanation why healthcare systems resist change is in a 1970 BBC Reith Lecture by Donald Schon, formerly Professor of Philosophy, University of California.
 
Schon borrowed a story from Elting Morison's 1968 book, Men, Machines and Modern Times, to describe entrenched social systems' resistance to change. 
 
During wartime, a young Naval officer named Sims invented a device that improved the accuracy of guns on ships by 300%, but the US Navy rejected it.
 
The device, "continuous-aim firing" used a simplified gearing mechanism that took advantage of the inertial movement of a ship. What previously a whole troupe of well-trained men had done, now one person, keeping his eye on the sight and his hands on the gears - could do.
 
To survive and grow, every major industry in today's network-centric world, except healthcare, has abandoned proprietary systems, embraced open standards and actively licensed technologies.  

 

 
Rejected on scientific grounds
Despite it's obvious advantages especially in a time of war, Sims found it extremely difficult to get his device adopted by the US Department of Navy. When finally the Navy did agree to test his system, they did so by taking it off the moving ship and strapping it onto a solid block on land. Since the device depended on the inertial movement of the ship, it didn't work and the Navy rejected the device on "scientific" grounds.
 
Eventually, Sims attracted the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who saw the advantages of the device and immediately insisted that it be adopted in the Atlantic and Pacific war theatres where it achieved a 300% increase in accuracy.
 
The American Navy's rejection to Sims's lifesaving technology is similar to Healthcare systems' reluctance to embrace technologies, which improve patient care and lower costs.

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