"On Friday, May 1, some 150 University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering students will showcase 34 novel devices that address myriad real-world medical challenges.The Takeaway: I've said before that you can get an early peak at health care's likely future by monitoring venture capital trends. You should pay attention to students, too. They don't (yet) know what they don't know, haven't had 'can't,' 'don't,' 'shouldn't,' 'mustn't...' drummed into their heads, and so operate with far fewer conceptual limitations than the rest of us.
"The biomedical engineering (BME) students' inventions include a phonetics-based communication device for children with significant communication disorders; a patient-transfer table for magnetic resonance imaging-guided liver-cancer treatment; and a low-cost spirometer for diagnosing pulmonary diseases in third-world countries."
Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Comments