The Fog of Experts
By Sean Lane | CrossChx CEO
One thing I like about our investor Vinod Khosla is his contempt for so called “experts.”
He says to ignore experts, and that their hit rate on being right is less than dart-throwing monkeys. I’ve always lived my life in a way that challenges these so-called experts. I was raised that way I guess. My dad actually instilled in me at a very early age to question anyone who supposedly knew more than me about any subject. It helped propel my entrepreneurial spirit. My teachers hated it.
I’ve found that experts do one thing very, very well. They convince the world that their subject is way too hard for mere mortals to understand. They build a cloud of mystification around their subject area that makes people conclude they need a so-called expert to navigate through the muck. I’ve learned that in virtually every case, when I’ve peeled back the surface layer, that this concept is garbage. There are very few things in this world that can’t be figured out with some research and a little effort. I call this mystification of things the “Fog of Experts”.
There’s probably no bigger culprit to the fog of experts than the healthcare industry. When we started CrossChx, and to this day, many people contend that we can’t possibly provide a solution to healthcare without having so-called healthcare expertise. Someone with healthcare expertise usually means they’ve worked in healthcare for a number of years or they have a diploma that has some kind of healthcare words in it. My contention is that healthcare expertise is more accurately described as healthcare status quo baggage. Most people who have spent their career in healthcare have been barraged with reasons why things can’t be done. Their aperture of innovation is limited to within the bounds of the existing construct, the existing architecture, and a version of truth as it’s known today. I feel this baggage is detrimental to an organization like ours most of the time.
The contrarians are the exception. There are those few bright, shining examples of people who grew up in the industry but have always maintained a contrarian view of how things work. They don’t confuse cynicism for insight like so many others with experience. Those contrarians are super valuable because they have essentially been acting as spies or double-agents for innovation. They’ve learned the ins and outs of a broken system but have never drank the Kool-aid of the status quo. When we find these folks, we try to bring them closer to the camp fire.
We’ve proven the experts wrong at every turn so far. We’ve hacked the healthcare distribution model and implemented system wide software software products at a lightening pace. We’ve invented a new way to think about patient identity from an outsider’s perspective. We’ve come up with a solution to the perennially lamented National Patient Identifier in our own novel way and bucked the massive round tables of thought leaders that have tried and failed to solve this problem for many years.
The future will bring many more examples of CrossChx seeing through the “Fog of Experts” while debunking and demystifying the common knowledge of healthcare. We’ll make mince meat out of payments, the HIE, data access and application integration. We’ll challenge the monolithic, multi-hundred million dollar software products with a radically available and dramatically innovative applications layer. We’ll continue to crush distribution and we’ll do so without so called experts.
The irony in all of this is that one day in the not so distant future we’ll be considered the experts. We’ll be held up as a model of what deep and far reaching expertise is healthcare can accomplish.
Thank you Wikipedia and elbow grease for making us experts.
Sean Lane is co-founder and CEO of CrossChx, the leader in identity resolution for smarter healthcare. Learn more about Sean here and follow him on Twitter here.
