Beyond technological and regulatory hurdles, a crucial barrier to healthcare innovation is complacency within leadership. Executives must be more curious and proactive in understanding emerging technologies to drive meaningful change.
Instead of chasing fleeting trends, true innovation improves the core, unchanging elements of an industry. In healthcare, this means enhancing the fundamental patient-provider relationship and experience, which are constants.
The future business model for health tech will shift from subscriptions (SaaS) to outcomes. Vendors will be paid based on the tangible results they generate, such as cost savings or improved patient health, aligning incentives.
While processes are essential for scaling, excessive rigidity stifles the iterative and experimental nature of innovation. Organizations must balance operational efficiency with the flexibility needed for creative breakthroughs, as too much process kills new ideas.
Despite industry rhetoric, healthcare technology development overwhelmingly prioritizes physicians over patients. This creates a significant gap, as the ultimate end-user's needs are often an afterthought in solution design.
A primary barrier to modernizing healthcare is that its core technology, the Electronic Health Record (EHR), is often built on archaic foundations from the 1960s-80s. This makes building modern user experiences incredibly difficult.
Current patient education relies on ineffective printouts. Generative AI can revolutionize this by creating personalized, interactive tools that adapt to a patient's specific health record, culture, language, and comprehension level.
Simply patching existing Electronic Health Records is insufficient. The next generation must be architected from the ground up with three core principles: offline functionality for resilience, a mobile-native experience, and generative AI at their core.