According to Wikipedia, the Technological Singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence through technological means. The Healthcare singularity could be the time when patients have access to better information and make better decisions than their physicians. The drive to this near future is fueled by the open and globaIized energy of patients as compared to physicians handicapped by closed and parochial health IT.
Physicians have skills. Institutions have capital. Patients have freedom, and that is what tips the information balance in their favor. When it comes to health IT, physicians and institutions are still busy installing closed, proprietary, single-vendor systems that erect strategic barriers to communications every chance they get. The protection of professional licensure and institutional consolidation gives both parties a sense of security even as the patient and policymaker barbarians are massing on the Web.
The Institute of Medicine just released Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. Aside from reaffirming the $765 billion of “Excess Costs”, the study highlights the following:
The committee also believes that opportunities exist for attacking these problems— opportunities that did not exist even a decade ago.
