[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

Happy to do a chapter on how to get involved in digital health.

[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

Ryan,

I do a fair amount of work mentoring health tech startups. It is pretty clear to me that for these solutions to work best and for tech to have its greatest impact on healthcare, each side has to have a working understanding of the other.

I think medical staff has been so turned off by the clunkiness of EMRs and frustration with things like voice recognition that are supposed to make life easier but instead decrease productivity and increase frustration. Of course, that doesn’t have to be the case.

The corollary argument is that IT professionals and those working on the tech side of digital health have to understand the uniqueness of technology in medicine. Things that make sense in theory from an IT perspective may not fit well when practically applied to care delivery.

IMO, it should be mandatory for IT/digital health innovators to spend a week shadowing a doctor in the clinic/hospital and for doctors to take workshops on health tech principles. Finding a common ground is absolutely critical to success. Digital health is here to stay and we have to find a way to make it work.

[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

Yep. I sign reams of these orders and documents that are multiple pages long and include things I never directly told them to do all so the agency can bill the insurance company and/or Medicare. That’s why I am slowly getting away from any home services or home PT (clinically there is plenty of evidence this isn’t needed).

[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

$50? Wow. I think Amazon let me rent it for $9.

[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

I think that’s exactly the point and why we will never be able to remove the healthcare provider from the equation. Medicine will always be an art and not a science. As Tom Lawry writes in his book we have “artificial intelligence” but are a long way from “artificial wisdom.”

[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

Yes. I think hospitals that are successful in adopting health tech will be able to get physicians and IT to work together.

All of the admins understand they need to embrace technology but few of them know how. Identify a physician champion and have that person work closely with the IT Department. I’m currently reading Tom Lawry’s book on AI in Healthcare (referenced in another discussion thread here). It deals with this very question. Good read.

[Benjamin Schwartz, MD, FAAOS]

Agreed. Pre-COVID I volunteered to have any health tech startup employees shadow me in clinic without any takers.

Also agree that there has been somewhat of a false narrative painted that all American healthcare is poor quality and the byproduct of greed and incompetence. As we know, the reality is far more complex. There is a reason healthcare is difficult to disrupt and many have failed. It is not as simple as it is made out to be which is something that tends to befuddle those with non-clinical backgrounds.