In 1997, health information technology and digital health pioneer Warner Slack wrote his bold and prophetic book, Cybermedicine: How Computing Empowers Doctors and Patients for Better Care. Slack argued that “the electronic digital computer, with its capacity to hold large amounts of data and to execute multiple complex instructions and accuracy would…find an important clinical role in both diagnosis and treatment.”
How to Accelerate the Adoption of Digital Health Technology
While the digitization of health information has solved many problems in American medicine — particularly, helping to reduce medical errors by enhancing clinical decision support — it has inevitably created many new ones. Clinician-oriented solutions such as electronic health records (EHRs) are contributing to physician burnout instead of facilitating patient care. Many anticipated that health information technology would reduce costs by limiting the duplication of tests and studies, but there is little evidence that it has accomplished this. And while patient-oriented digital solutions have proliferated in number, their clinical impact has been limited. Yet there are rays of light, each of which shares a common denominator: a rigorous focus on the specific needs of the end user, be it patient or clinician. When creative health systems consider and engage the end user of the digital technology as the “customer” of that technology, adoption levels are high and so, too, is the impact. Two CareMore Health initiatives serve as examples: One provides patients with non-emergency transportation, and the other is a new secure platform for clinical team communication and collaboration.