Big Data Now

I couldn’t call a report on ITdotHealth complete without an account of the two keynotes by Christensen and Eric Horvitz, although these took off in different directions from the rest of the conference and served as hints of future developments. Christensen is still adding new twists to the theories laid out in The Innovator’s Dilemma and other books. He has been a backer of the SMART project from the start and spoke at the first ITdotHealth conference. Consistent with his famous theory of disruption, he dismisses hopes that we can reduce costs by reforming the current system of hospitals and clinics. Instead, he projects the way forward through technologies that will enable less trained experts to successively take over tasks that used to be performed in more high-cost settings. Thus, nurse practitioners will be able to do more and more of what doctors do, primary care physicians will do more of what we current delegate to specialists, and ultimately the patients and their families will treat themselves.