Over at HBR.org, there’s an interesting post titled “Disruptive changes are coming to the delivery of medical care” by Stephen C Schimpff based on his book titled “The future of medicine: Megatrends in health care that will improve your quality of life“.
In this post, Schimpff highlights the following areas that might significantly affect delivery of services:
- Team-based care for chronic illness
- Echelons of care for acute illness
- More high-tech hospitals
- Patient-centric medicine
- Delegation of care
- A new value proposition for technology
- Employee physicians
- E-health
It’s an interesting list. I can see employers and employees banding together to challenge the existing organization of services aided by information and communication standards. Granted, this is all contingent upon the development of standards which facilitates the easy transfer of information. Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang talk about the need for business model innovation in their book, The Innovator’s Prescription, which can only occur when there is the free flowing of (medical) information.
I also think that there will be a bi-modal distribution of services into high-tech, ultra-sophisticated organizations (most likely large teaching hospitals which are tertiary care centres) and low-cost, convenient, simple service delivery options (think of the Minute Clinic).