Doctors Without Technology?!
The Forbes article “5 Things Preventing Technology Adoption In Health Care” is, upon first glance, rather concerning, given that progress in the world of medicine relies heavily on technological advancements. The five titular reasons capture a spectrum of issues in introducing new technologies into the healthcare industry: arising technology miscalculates the area of need, is expensive, heightens information transparency, demands a larger time investment, and creates an impersonal atmosphere. These complaints, while valid explanations for the slow uptake of medical technologies, do not justify a continual resistance to digitization of the workplace. Reading on, we find that the physicians’ aversion to streamlining data entry processes through technology is a curable phenomenon.
Medicine, historically a highly personalized and intimate field, is understandably rigid in regards to outsourcing human work to technology. It has a higher threshold than other sectors, such as economics or finance, for adopting new technologies. As noted at the Stanford Medicine X Conference (MedX) mentioned in the article, often, technology is innovative and has impressive capabilities in the abstract, but its lag in distributive momentum results from a fundamental futility in the actual field. Doctors typically do not need to interact daily with big data that various devices have the capacity to store, and they do not want to make health records publicly available and completely uncensored to the patient. Additionally, technology can even be detrimental: for instance, in the case that a medical application automatically orders a medication that a patient is allergic to. However, in this age of technology and consumerism, with a growing percentage of millennial doctors and medical professionals, technology is still expected to permeate the industry — slowly but steadily.
The most obvious solution to the aforementioned hurdles is simplicity — both in purpose and in pricing. As we have learned in class, a new technology or behavior is likely to be adopted when a certain threshold of adoption within one’s social circle has been reached. It follows that a low-maintenance implementation coupled with low monetary cost would appeal to the largest audience, inadvertently allowing the technology to begin its spread throughout the medical space. Furthermore, this invokes another principle discussed in class: the direct benefit effect. As more individual doctors or hospitals adopt new technologies, it is in the best interest of the remaining medical staff both in the same hospital and in others to adopt it as well, in order to stay current and competitive. If not, discrepancies in efficiency and record-keeping between different departments or hospitals would destabilize the industry. The generally positive response of the patients themselves is also a convincing influence: as doctors observe several of their patients favoring technological devices and methods, they will be keen to apply them, since, as we established in class, the adoption of technology is highly contingent on one’s interactions.
