Simplifying Healthcare for a Healthier Future: The Role of Technology
As a surgeon with two decades of hands-on experience in healthcare delivery, surgery, global health, and innovation, I’ve had a front-row seat to witness the continuous evolution of our healthcare system, particularly its interaction with technology. Today, I want to delve into a pivotal shift that the healthcare industry should wholeheartedly embrace in the coming years: simplifying healthcare through technology.
First and foremost, let’s address a significant challenge in our healthcare system: complexity. Over the years, our healthcare landscape has become a complex web of specialized services, each dedicated to specific medical conditions or body parts. This complexity often places a heavy burden on patients and primary care physicians, who find themselves piecing together fragmented care. Today, technology offers us a unique opportunity to simplify this complexity. Instead of creating more specialized tech-enabled services, we should focus on using technology to seamlessly connect these services, compressing and consolidating data into meaningful packets that benefit both patients and their primary care teams. This is where AI can make a substantial difference, streamlining the healthcare journey for all.
Beyond connecting various services, AI can also be leveraged to reduce administrative overhead in healthcare. An alarming statistic reveals that 25% of healthcare costs are administrative in nature, and, importantly, one-third of these costs are within the control of health systems. This presents an encouraging opportunity for health systems to shift their focus towards simplification. To do so, we must cultivate a cultural shift and behavioral pattern that emphasizes subtraction over addition. Currently, our healthcare systems are burdened with committees that continuously generate low-value protocols and procedures without revisiting and removing outdated ones, resulting in unnecessary complexity. We must shift our focus from mitigating all possible legal risks to doing what’s best for patients.
This risk-averse approach has also led to the erosion of autonomy among senior nurses and experienced healthcare professionals. New regulations and restrictions have stifled their ability to make critical decisions, creating silos within the healthsystem, that is further compounded by the current training structure as well. To simplify healthcare, we must reverse this trend by first training healthcare professionals in an interdisciplinary fashion in both outpatient and in the community. Second, we need to empower them with technology, not only for training, competency testing, but with technology that enables real-time decision support. Having a co-pilot can literally help restore critical thinking and questioning and as a result increase autonomy by creating an environment where they never feel alone in making crucial decisions.
As well look to leverage technology to make things simpler, we should not exclusively focus on large hospitals and academic centers. The real potential lies in simplifying care particularly for community hospitals. As more people move away from cities in search of an improved quality of life, the demand will only increase and we must support these community and rural healthcare centers. Telemedicine, remote monitoring, and data analytics are just the beginning. We need to explore innovative ways to empower these hospitals to provide top-tier care without requiring patients to travel long distances.
Finally, imagine if we shifted our focus from simply caring for communities to actively promoting their health, leveraging technology to understand how. This holistic approach entails not only treating illnesses but also addressing environmental and social determinants of health. Does the community have clean air, green spaces, access to healthy food, safety, and a sense of community? These factors profoundly influence individuals’ health and well-being. Our hospitals should thereofre become reflections of healthy communities, not only healing the sick but also actively promoting community-wide health.
The next phase of healthcare technology should revolve around simplification. By streamlining our healthcare system, empowering healthcare professionals, and prioritizing community health, we can harness the power of innovation and AI to create a healthcare system that is not only more efficient but also more compassionate. It’s time to embark on this transformative journey toward a healthier future.
Dr. Salim Afshar
