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567191-health-hacking healthcare

Jeff Bezos and a cabal of billionaires surprised everyone final month with the announcement that they're conspiring to disrupt the healthcare industry. They are planning to offer a "not-for-profit" system that would initially be made bachelor to employees of their respective companies, just with the potential to exist rolled out to Americans en masse. It's not the showtime time a group of über-wealthy, revolutionary-minded individuals have plotted to overthrow a tyrannical system. Simply references to America's founding fathers aside, one outstanding question remains: How will these visionaries slay the merciless beast that the American healthcare system has become?

One matter is almost bodacious: Given their respective companies and interests, a heavy dose of technology will likely figure into the mix. Allow's chance a few guesses as to what ingredients we may see in this healthcare organization of the hereafter. We'll round up some of the usual suspects from the health tech manufacture, and run into how they are likely to play a role in the Bezos-Cafe-Dimon model.

The Stop of the Waiting Room

Waiting to exist seen by a doctor is both a nuisance and a drag on the economy. In general, you're probable to spend fifteen to 30 minutes in the waiting room on a typical role visit, to say nothing of the commute. In return you're lucky if y'all get a paltry five minutes of the doctor's time. That means for every one 60 minutes of a doctor's fourth dimension, the sick must spend upwards of vi hours waiting for them. In the equation of ill people versus healthy ones, this places the greater burden upon those who are already feeling miserable, a miscarriage of justice of ever there was one.

The fix is already out at that place; in most cases, telemedicine tin can replace the current office-visit model. At least initially, we're probable to run across this manner of diagnosis playing a major role in the Bezos-Buffet-Dimon model. In the long run, though, even telemedicine is likely to get muscled out by AI-driven diagnostic systems, eliminating the general practitioner as gatekeeper for those who demand a specialist or laboratory tests. In the time to come, such inefficiencies will be eliminated, as artificial intelligence volition excel compared with human doctors at near every course of diagnostic intervention.

Liberating Patient Data

Currently most of a patient'due south health data remains siloed in vendor-specific data chambers. Like acquisitive goblins hoarding their plunder, companies similar Epic Systems have stockpiled patient information, refusing to found the interoperability standards that would allow patients and other health care operators to make the all-time use of this treasure trove. The ultimate victims accept been the patients themselves, who often discover themselves spending hours on the telephone between specialists trying to make sure their files get to the right person at the right time.

Tech companies like Amazon have typically eschewed company-specific standards, as they human activity every bit a kind of bottleneck on information period. Instead, the tech industry has embraced APIs, or awarding programming interfaces, which permit for data to be safely shared between systems. Interoperability standards will exist a big office of the Bezos-Buffet-Dimon model, and clients should have much more timely access to their data. Anything less would be a blotch on the new system.

Cutting out the Middleman

Amazon has made a science of cutting out the middleman, eliminating many of the brick and mortar stores that offered like goods to the cyberspace behemothic. While there may exist expert reason to mourn the loss of mom-and-pop bookstores, stores that suffered in the Amazon era, I can find no cause for sympathy for Walgreens and CVS. Pharmaceutical dispensaries such equally these are likely to exist cut out of a new health care model, with lower costs passed on to the patients themselves. Merely should you lot find yourself feeling a twinge of remorse for CEO Larry Merlo of CVS, who took home a absurd 18 meg dollars in salary last year, no dubiousness a charity tin exist established in his proper noun to benefit struggling CEOs.

Getting the Genomics Revolution Underway

There is a tranquility revolution underway in the medical field thanks to the confluence of artificial intelligence, Big Information, and genomics. This goes well across the direct-to-consumer reports offered by companies like 23andMe. The genomics revolution will affect everything from the vetting of prescription drugs to how we choose which vitamins to have. Unfortunately, virtually of these advances have all the same to trickle down to doctors offices in the US, where your average family practitioner is completely uninformed about their patients' genetics. Amazon, as a pioneer of large information and artificial intelligence, is likely to bring their muscle into play, making genomics a bigger part of the patient experience.

tricorder

Dynamical Biomarkers Group fielded the T06, their tricorder prototype. Image credit: XPrize

These are simply a handful of the changes we tin look to see in the Bezos-Cafe-Dimon model, with even more drastic disruption likely to have place as gadgets like the tricorder make their way into the hands of patients and doctors. Just perhaps the most pressing question is the 1 left unaddressed. The tool nominally responsible for encouraging this kind of healthcare innovation is itself malfunctioning; we're left relying on the expert will of billionaires to do what is arguably the chore of government. What do you do when the institution overseeing the healthcare industry is so intertwined with the special interest groups holding the organization back that information technology cannot be relied upon to make the kind of substantial changes that would improve outcomes for patients?

Another, much older group of revolutionary-minded Americans had something to say on that score. To quote Henry David Thoreau: "There are a g hacking at the branches of evil to 1 who is hitting at the root." Wherever Bezos and his comrades fall upon this calibration of intervention, we tin be glad they have taken an interest in changing what is obviously 1 of the most perniciously cleaved sectors of the American economy.