Relentless Health Value

Medicine is complex. It’s getting more complex. We double what we know in medicine every 73 days. There’s 800,000 journal articles published every year. It is impossible for any human to keep up. It’s just impossible. There’s a lot of talk about amazing technology to help humans manage the 26,000 variables in heart failure treatment or what have you. And, yeah, I’m a huge fan of technology doing what technology is good at doing. But here’s a point to ponder: Just like meds don’t work if the patient doesn’t take them, technology kinda doesn’t work unless it’s part of a bigger framework. Who in the practice uses it or deploys it? Who checks the dashboard and follows up with patients and how do they follow up with patients? This is all process. Of course, there’s good processes and not-so-good processes. But a value of process as a construct is you can incrementally improve a process. You can’t incrementally improve everybody doing different things at different times. Nobody seems to talk about this in the “cool