8 predictions for healthcare and HIT – 2010 and beyond

It seems that like for the past few days I’ve been blogging about nothing but our homeowner’s association. Today, time to take a break from that. I am, after all, a nurse. And a nurse with an interest in technology in health care. Unlike most bloggers in that space, I didn’t make my decade predictions on how technology in healthcare will roll out over the next few years. So here goes:

  1. Governmental efforts to push healthcare reform and healthcare technological advancement will meet increasing resistance. Tax dollars will continue to flow into these areas, for the time being, but return on investment will become increasing difficult to prove, and improvement in patient outcomes will stall as clinical IT departments realize how complex healthcare really is (even compared to computer programming).
  2. In effort to attract government funding, large healthcare organizations will spend more on IT implementation and improvement projects. However, there really isn’t anything exciting happening with project management methodology, so many healthcare dollars, both private and public will be wasted. Smaller organizations–the 80% of all healthcare–will find that the government cash incentives for them to automate are not sufficient for them to actually make the leap.
  3. There will be more consolidation–smaller organizations being swallowed up by larger ones–in an effort to increase scale to improve profitability. Then, the pendulum will swing the other way, as the behemoths, scale back down in an effort to rediscover their core competencies. Some true giants will enter the mix, probably. A Microsoft or a Google getting serious about healthcare would change the big picture forever, even if their incursions into the healthcare space were temporary.
  4. A bigger piece of the healthcare dollar will be spent on regulatory compliance, as government realizes it will have the technology to measure and regulate more of the healthcare world.
  5. New technologies will continue to roll into the marketplace. Google-type web-based systems and cloud computing will become more common, as security and privacy experts race to keep up in protecting patient rights. Tablet-type and smart-phone-type devices will be common devices in the healthcare setting, as will many new devices designed to measure physiological functions. The challenge will be in what to do with all the new data.
  6. New healthcare technology will move out to the rural areas and under-served in urban areas, as the technology itself becomes cheaper and as high-speed connectivity becomes common.
  7. The Baby Boom will crescendo, as boomers struggle to care for aging parents. The boomers, of course, are aging as well and are putting increasing demands on novel and unstable technologies and systems. Hopefully, there is not some sort of “tipping point” looming, where the whole universe collapses into chaos.
  8. The political arena, which has controlled so much of what happens in healthcare, will transform, as providers and patients alike gain access, through technology, into the deepest levels of the decision-making process. That is, we become smarter than the civil service and the many other bureaucracies that permeate and control healthcare today! Joy! Sorry, this wasn’t meant to be too Utopian.

What are your predictions for healthcare? Innovative or more-of-the-same. We want to hear your thoughts. Please Comment!