Healthcare Design - May 2015 - 26

C THE CENTER | 05.15
The next big thing
Emerging technologies stand to reinvent the way healthcare is delivered, enhancing
accessibility and lowering costs, all without losing that personal touch
By Debra Levin
Recently in Spain, activists staged the world's
first holographic political demonstration to
protest a newly passed law that fines protesters
for convening outside government buildings.
Photographs of the event showed thousands of
holograms marching in front of the parliament
in Madrid.
This got me thinking: We already have virtual
doctor's visits via kiosks and home computers, making care not only more convenient but
available to people who live in remote areas.
Additionally, we can send emails to our doctors
24/7 and attach photographs of issues concerning us. There are robots that move about
some healthcare facilities, displaying the faces
of caregivers on monitors as they smile, engage
passersby, and visit patients. Taking this one
step further, Toshiba has introduced a humanoid
robot that will start working in Japanese retail
spaces later this year. Might healthcare not be
too far behind?
There is a slew of new digital diagnostic equipment available, such as the digital
otoscope that can capture a high-quality video
of one's ear canal and send it to a doctor for
review, or the stethoscope that creates a digital
audio file that can be shared.
Thinking about the protest in Spain, how long
will it be until we have a holographic doctor
visit us at home or appear in our workplace or
exam room? Will we find the perfect blending of
humanity and technology that will allow quality
care to be accessible in all areas of the globe,
at an affordable cost, and still allow for the
always important caregiver-patient relationship
to develop?
Care delivery models are just one aspect of
our healthcare system that stands to change
dramatically with the onslaught of new and
emerging technologies.
I recently had lunch with a past Healthcare
Design Conference keynote speaker, Mickey
McManus. As a follow-up to his book Trillions,
Mick is currently a visiting fellow at Autodesk,
exploring ideas around the next big thing to
follow the Internet of Things. He talked about
a world that will one day be so saturated with
computation that rather than information living
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in computers, we'll instead live within the information. He went on to explain that information
will feed machines in a way that they will learn
as they go, make decisions in the same way
that the human mind does, and in time, even
make decisions for us. It's the same technology that's being used to create the self-driving
automobile.

Care delivery models are just one aspect
of our healthcare system that stands to
change dramatically with the onslaught of
new and emerging technologies.
At The Center, we've been doing a lot of
thinking about technology and its impact on
healthcare delivery, healthcare quality, the patient experience, and the overall cost of care.
Later this year, we're planning to hold a think
tank-style meeting with some of the best and
brightest in the area of technological advances
in healthcare, both from within our industry
as well as from other industries. The idea is to
start to envision what the digital hospital and
healthcare experience of the future will look
like and what problems it will present that we,
as creators and custodians of the built environment, can help to solve.
The ideas and knowledge from this collaborative will in time make their way into new
tools and resources to support innovative solutions to old and emerging concerns. Keep your
eye out for more information this fall. If you'd
like to follow the progress of this developing
new project or if you have any thoughts or
ideas about this topic, we'd love to hear about
them. HCD
Debra Levin is president and CEO of The
Center for Health Design. She can be reached
at dlevin@healthdesign.org.

Debra Levin

http://www.HCDmagazine.com

Healthcare Design - May 2015

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