Healthcare's Age of Acceleration

  I recently finished Thomas Friedman's excellent book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. In it, Friedman makes that case that we are living through an unparalleled time, marked by what he calls "accelerations" that are happening faster than humans are able to adapt.  He argues that we are living through the most dramatic inflection point since Gutenberg and the subsequent Reformation in Europe.

Friedman argues that the three primary forces shaping events are advancements in technology, global interconnection and climate change.  What is notable about these three forces is that they all show signs of exponential change, not linear. As an example, here is an illustration from the book showing the exponential drop in the cost of DNA sequencing, plotted against the trajectory that we would have seen according to Moore's law (which would predict a doubling of computing power every 1-2 years).

The problem with these "hockey-stick" exponential curves is that technological change happens more and more quickly (aided by the"standing on the shoulders" of earlier technology).  The change happens faster than human's abilities to adapt.

I'm taken by Friedman's arguments.  I'd argue that one of the reasons that healthcare workers have felt so discombobulated over recent years is exactly this issue of unimpeded technical acceleration that exceeds physician's abilities to acclimatize. Atal Gawande touched on this during his Stanford commencement speech in 2010, reprinted in the New Yorker:

Besides discombobulating physicians, I'd argue that scientific and technical complexity also threatens to overwhelm patients. Our ability to

do

increasingly exceeds our ability to

decide what to do

... You can see this dynamic during every complicated end of life discussion, where the technical promise of immortality seems often at odds with human needs. In an earlier post I wrote about the concept of "human scale"

Here's my bet: going forward, physicians aren't going to need to be technical experts.  Instead, in the age of computer learning,

the physician is going to need to be the person who makes healthcare human scale

.  That's the important work ahead. Friedman, incidentally, arrives at a similar conclusion.  He writes: ...the highest-paying jobs in the future will be

stempathy

jobs

— jobs that combine strong science and technology skills with the ability to empathize with another human being.

Photos:  Don McCullough cc license, Flikr