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Is It Time for Your Doctor to Get Online?

10:47 AM Tuesday August 19, 2008

Tags:Innovation, Internet

My friend and co-author Larry Prusak is always talking about the "democratization of knowledge." This is an increasingly popular topic, with its own (appropriate) Wikipedia entry and a number of blog posts.

Larry and I both think that this trend has both positive and negative aspects, but is nonetheless somewhat inevitable. It's clear that sources of intellectual authority -- from encyclopedias to editors -- don't matter online as much as they used to in print, and that this democratization is spreading to realms other than Internet opinions.

But my question for today is whether this trend will lead to new business models for traditional knowledge-based industries and businesses. There's a lot of talk, for example, about the spread of public knowledge in medicine, and how it's changing the role of the physician. I'll grant that online knowledge has probably affected millions of doctor-patient interactions in the examination room and the hospital. I'm not sure how much doctors like it, but that horse is out of the barn, and it ain't going back in.

However, you still can't prescribe your own drugs (unless you leave the US) or make your own referrals. You can't sign yourself up for an appendectomy if your online browsing has convinced you that you need one. Most doctors won't even give you an email address so that you can tell them what you think you have and ask for drugs or other treatments.

So I'm wondering when that particular industry is going to offer some new business models that take the widespread availability of knowledge into account.

Just as I hardly ever visit a bank teller today, when will we make it easy to visit the doctor only for annual checkups? Which medical provider will acknowledge that the line between medical professional and amateur has begun to blur, and offer products and services that take advantage of the blurring?

One would think it would be a good business idea, for example, for a health insurer to offer online consultations with a doctor or nurse practitioner. You tell them your symptoms and what you think you have, and they confirm (or dispute) your self-diagnosis. Of course, it's possible to lie online about your symptoms, but you can do that in the doctor's office too. Some might object that we'll over-medicate ourselves, but don't we do that already? And since you only get about 7 minutes on average of face-to-face time with your doc, it's not as if we are giving up an intimate, in-depth relationship. No muss, no fuss, no bricks-and-mortar, and the insurance company gets by very cheaply.

There are some emergent ways to bypass knowledgeable professionals in some other fields. If you want to, you can create your own legal documents, and I find TurboTax easier than hiring an accountant to do my taxes. It's probably time that other professions, like medicine, acknowledged that they don't have all the knowledge to themselves.

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Davenport on Health from Circle of Health Blog:
We are big fans of Tom Davenport at SAS.  His widely-acclaimed book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, does an excellent job of building the business case for why enterprises need to be incorporating analytics as a core part of the... More

Tracked on August 19, 2008 15:22

Comments

The most interesting part of the democratization of knowledge is not that people can come together to share knowledge (that was soooo 2005), but how people actually use this knowledge. Anytime there is information asymmetry, there will always be a business opportunity.

Furthermore, information now has much higher quality that previously. Before, you could join up with a bunch of 'nobodies' and discuss and share knowledge (there are not enough experts to go around) but today, one can get information from experts by watching Harvard and MIT lectures or watching TED talks. Then you can form a lose collective with others and discuss.

With regards to the US medical system, the boom in medical tourism will radically (and painfully) transform our system. I see all the things you talk about in your post coming true as a result of being able to go abroad to get better comfort and better care both for less money. Competing with that will create a trickle down effect where the non-surgical "little" things will also benefit.

Bruce Yang
www.20somethingsuccess.com

- Posted by Bruce Yang 
August 19, 2008 2:11 PM

Accepting the technology-enabled shifts in the doctor-patient relationship, what remains to be seen is the impact of those shifts on healthcare cost, quality, availability, and outcomes – the compelling drivers for the emergence of new business models to support the “democratization of knowledge.”

Patients not only self-diagnose; they ask for brand-name drugs to treat their symptoms. The combination of online patient communities, the accessibility of health-related information, and direct-to-consumer advertising (online and offline) has already created an environment where patients may know as much or more about current treatment trends as their physicians.

I believe that informed healthcare consumers make better choices, and there are a lot of similarities between the TurboTax example and healthcare – increasing complexity, direct financial impact, and the interpretive “art” (as opposed to science) of the practice. The unfortunate difference is that tax rules apply equally (though not necessarily equitably) to everyone, whereas medical science has now shown that one person’s medicine is quite possibly another person’s poison. Does the democratization of medical knowledge enable or discourage the democratization of costs, risks, and outcomes? In the case of tax software it does; in the case of healthcare, maybe not.

I suspect the answer lies in the middle, with more informed consumers making more informed decisions about how to spend their healthcare dollars, but more informed medical practitioners leveraging more sophisticated analytics and engaging online and face-to-face with their patients to provide more informed consultations.

Jason Burke
http://www.sas.com/industry/healthcare

- Posted by Jason Burke 
August 19, 2008 2:56 PM

The time is ripe for discussion about transformation of delivery of healthcare services. Just last week, the Joint Commission published a white paper on "The Hospital of the Future" which presents a new view of how patient care and outcomes can be improved by reducing and/or mitigating inefficiencies in the process of delivering healthcare. Here is a link to that whitepaper http://www.myhealthtechblog.com/2008/11/the-hospital-of.html

There's no doubt that the only aspect of U.S. healthcare that hits the highest marks globally, is the amount of money spent. Sad but true. I am hoping for a wave of change that reduces costs and inefficiencies while at the same time improves patient outcomes and health. My 2 cents.

- Posted by Deborah Leyva 
November 24, 2008 8:33 PM

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Tom Davenport

Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, where he also leads the Process Management and Working Knowledge Research Centers. His books and articles on business process reengineering, knowledge management, attention management, knowledge worker productivity, and analytical competition helped to establish each of those business ideas. His website is tomdavenport.com

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