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This is the question that Wireless Healthcare, a Cambridge UK firm addressed in a recent report ($$) it issued. (Thanks to NWMD for the heads-up). The key point here, as NWMD observes is this: “The report notes that the barriers to entry are lower for vendors targeting the remote care market whereas there is often strong resistance to change within hospitals.” Put in a broader context, will hospitals and other health care institutions, due to their slowness and inability to adapt, be stripped of those functions than can be done better, more simply and at less cost than is currently the case? Will technology, and the accompanying social change that it drives, put hospitals, as we now know them, out of business? The notion of ‘patient monitoring centers‘, for example, is intriguing to say the least.
It would be easy to argue that the transformative energy to change the hospital will not come from within the institution itself. But that does not mean such fearsome change will not happen. Just like the phenomenon of Wikipedia did not come from the university (as Charles Nesson recently noted), the new models of health care may not come from the hospital.
