Diagnosing why innovation hasn’t stopped healthcare productivity declines

Autonomous vehicles. Augmented reality. Artificial Intelligence.

The world is undergoing radical transformation via technological innovation. Healthcare is not immune to this trend and has lately unleashed its own wonders from CRISPR to 3D-printed prosthesis to sensor-enabled pills. We can truly transform lives in ways unimaginable even just 10 years ago.

In other ways, however, healthcare lags.

In transportation, Google’s first “driverless” Street View cars were on the road a scant few years after the DARPA Grand Challenges of the mid-2000s that paved the way for them, and Uber become a verb in the same amount of time it takes to implement a current EHR system. Furthermore, Amazon’s chatty Alexa now interacts with you in your home, having arrived just a short time after Siri became the personal assistant in your pocket.

Healthcare innovation has been incapable of gaining similar traction even with profound technological advances.

There is an unmentionable dark side of healthcare innovation.

Advances in productivity via utilization of new tools and technologies has been anemic. Healthcare is struggling to keep pace with other industries. In fact, in a recent McKinsey study, healthcare is one of only two industries (construction is the other) that has shown a productivity decline. Read that again: Despite IT spending growth increasing by over 5 percent per year over the last 10 years, we’ve actually seen the healthcare labor pool and service environment become less efficient!