Technology creates a Tsunami like change in Healthcare's leadership environment

For the last decade and a half I have been researching the future of healthcare and the effect of that future on the leadership environment and more importantly on the interconnectivity that these changes will bring to the patient.
As a speaker, I started each seminar with a question to help me gauge the familiarity of my audience with this subject. The question was, “During the development or revision of your strategic plan, how many of you took into consideration the Walgreens, Amazon.com, the pharmaceutical industry, or Dole Food Company's strategies?" What I was unprepared for was that as many times as I asked this same question, I never had an indication in the affirmative.
As good as that may have been for future speaking engagements, it concerned me that even though there were some seismic changes occurring in healthcare, they were apparently going on unnoticed. The truth is that we should be looking and preparing for the tsunami like change in the diagnostic, administrative, and therapeutic milieu.
This wave like transformation started quietly with the onset of NASA's need for biological testing, physiological monitoring, rapid computing as well as superior communications under less than optimal conditions. This was one of the first if not the seismic event that started the tsunami’s construct.
This is what I typed in 2002. Less than a decade later I am dictating this on an iPad tablet. The tsunami I noted has in many cases overcome healthcare organization and providers.
This primer was written in 2002 to offer providers options to get through these changes. Like the earth quake based tsunami there is another more subtle wave like changes on the horizon, specifically that of the Tech Savvy Patient.
The provider's primer will be published in June of this year and the second in this series, The Savvy Patient, will be published in the fall of 2012.
Webster Russell
- Posted from my iPad HD

Location:Georgetown TX,United States