Predictions about strategic shifts in healthcare intrigue me. There is always the question in one's mind about whether you agree with the list. A recent article was labeled as a list of healthcare "disruptions" but otherwise caught my attention (see: 6 Major Disruptions Still To Come In Healthcare). Here's the list stripped of the accompanying brief explanations:
- Conversion of physicians to electronic health records.
- Removing the responsibility of records-sharing from the patient.
- The rise of the genomic signature as part of the medical record.
- Moving the responsibility [for] care and outcomes from the provider location to the consumer location.
- The rise of health avatars.
- The change in physician compensation from fee-for-service to fee-for-outcomes.
What interested me at first glance was that three of the six items (1,2, and 5) were related to the conversion to e-records. I must admit, however, that I was not familiar with health avatars, which caused me to do some searching in the web. It turns out that this is not a new concept -- I found a reference to the idea in a five-year old note (see: Avatar to Help Doctors Visualize Patient Records and Improve Care):
The technology uses an avatar -- a 3D representation of the human body -- to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), this innovative visualization method allows a doctor to click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar "body" to trigger a search of medical records to retrieve relevant information. "It's like Google Earth for the body," said [an IBM spokesperson].
Compared to the other five disruptions in the list, this one seems relatively insignificant. I think that most physicians don't need to click on an avatar to prompt a search of the medical records. Most, I am sure, would be better served by a search using a natural language phrase. An example might be: Any previous positive Pap smears?
However, this concept of health avatars did remind me that radiology imaging with various types of modalities (CT, MRI, PET) is becoming ubiquitous for most hospital inpatients. Although many physicians depend primarily on the interpretive reports from radiology regarding these studies, some of them will retrieve the images from the hospital PACS servers and personally review them. Pathology images from digital pathology systems are also becoming increasingly common. On this basis, I could easily envision an "imaging avatar" that would be very useful for clinicians. Clicking on a body part of the avatar would retrieve all relevant radiology and pathology images for that body part plus all of the associated reports. Some of these images could also be color-coded and "registered" in order to pack more information into a single image. Multimodal image registration software has been commonplace for a number of years.
As a person/patient, as well as a healthcare marketer. I'm dying to see how #6 plays out.
Posted by: Charles Lauller | August 27, 2011 at 08:40 AM