Innovation opinions by McKinsey

McKinseys had a few good articles on innovation posted yeasterday. I’d recommend them for a read – and particularly the comments below each article which are quite insightful and perhaps better in content terms also.

This article, on how economic downturns drive innovation was quite controversial. I found one of the comments by a Paul Hamann quite insightful:

Here’s three big ideas for innovation resulting from this recession:

1. Medicine will become an application of computer science. This innovation will finally end the health care crisis and expose the incompetence of most doctors. That’s why the Obama administration won’t compromise on linking physician compensation to outcomes. It’s also why they won’t cap malpractice awards. That’s 17% of GDP finally subject to competition. Info Tech companies will take most of it. Google and Intel will do well. They already are.

2. Computers will become carbon-based instead of silicon, resulting in unlimited compute cycles that are nearly free. This advance will result in absolute ubiquity. It will also enable NP-complete problems to be efficiently solved. That will lead to enormous leaps in engineering and science.

3. The distinction between mobile phone, desktop, and server will go away. We’ll see hardware and Linux-based OS’s become interchangeable across the three categories. This innovation will ultimately benefit Google and end Microsoft’s dominance in software. It will also give a huge boost to the open source movement, benefiting developers and niche software providers. Finally, it will severely disrupt the economics of cloud computing. After all, every new technology gets over-hyped. It’s already time to ask what the cloud computing bust will look like.

I included all three of his points for completeness, but can only comment about the first. It’s a fairly broad sweep but there is some truth in it. It’s by no means an original idea, with the likes of Clayton Christensen and the author of ‘Supercrunchers’ (name?) predicting the exposure of doctors incompetence when health goes truly digital.

The next question for doctors is then how to best prepare for this from an educational perspective. Do we just wait for the innovation? Or should we begin to change our ways of practising medicine in anticipation?

I believe many doctors already are adapting as patients gain access to knowledge and tools they never had previously. As I’ve suggested before, we are becoming more like health managers than health teachers.

Will Patients Appreciate Big-Brother Pharmacists?

The Australian Pharmacy Guild has adapted software from the USA that allows pharmacists to track patient compliance with their medications. It is an attempt to get expand the professional role of pharmacists. And one drug company, Pfizer, has already teamed up with the guild to get pharmacists to coach patients at the point-of-dispensing if they seem to be missing doses of Lipitor.

It is a reality that compliance is an issue with many medications and therefore the software, named Mirixa, could be useful. But I wonder whether the creators considered what patients will think when a pharmacist leans over the counter and says, to their surprise, ‘you haven’t been taking your medication’! I’m sure, of course, they won’t do that because they will have read the guilds ‘motivational interviewing’ document for Mirixa.

It’s a principle in medicine that you never presume such knowledge, even is you think you have a good idea of compliance to a treatment prescribed. Patients hate doctors being paternalistic. So I find it very hard to see how patients will take to this approach unless they somehow ask to be signed up to the program (according to the consumer info this seems to be the case).

In fact, I wonder how this software fits in with our current privacy legislation? Perhaps someone can help me out? Mirixa does have a statement about privacy here.