The news of Patrick Swayze passing away last week from pancreatic cancer, caused me to feel the expected emotions of sadness and concern for his family to delight and appreciation when remembering his career which included pop icon movies like Ghost and Dirty Dancing and the legendary Saturday Night Live skit with the late Chris Farley. There was also a thought that popped into my head that I immediately connected with the healthcare issues of today. Mr. Swayze’s illness is hard to detect, painful to treat, and rarely ever stopped in its tracks—all in all a very tragic prognosis that he took with great strength and perseverance as he was determined to live life to the fullest with the time he had left. But the thought that entered my mind about healthcare actually was sparked from one of his tough-as-nails fictional characters.
There was a scene in Swayze’s guy-hero classic Road House, where his character Dalton, is being treated for an injury at the small town hospital. The doctor asks about his previous injuries (of which as a bouncer in a bar there were many). Swayze’s character pulls out a manila folder with all of his medical history, complete with x-rays, operations, etc. The doctor looks stunned at first but, as his soon-to-be love interest, she smiles and moves on with the procedure.
That idea of carrying around all of the procedures, diagnoses, treatments, and medical directives that a person has ever been given seems like a silly movie conceit, but then you stop and think that if in fact everyone did have such a manila folder, the improvement in medial outcomes could be significant. It has been well documented that incomplete medical histories or conflicting treatments from one doctor to another do result in poorer outcomes and that eliminating such errors and omissions would not only save lives but reduce overall healthcare costs.
Flash forward to today with the process of digitizing medical records, organizing them into easy-to-understand formats, and making them easy to share across the entire healthcare system. This is not a new industry as it has been around for years, but it is just recently getting the attention of the media and the public. A substantial amount of tax money in recent legislation is going to the expansion of the healthcare IT industry and more emphasis is being put on the need for collaboration among all of the stakeholders in the treatment and prevention of disease.
It’s about time.
As a company that works in the innovation and design worlds, the growth of healthcare IT is a very instructive lesson into how innovations can come about and the impact they can have on how things get done. Think about it for a second: twenty years ago, Dalton had the wherewithal to know that a doctor would need to know his previous medical history in order to treat future ailments. he took it upon himself to compile the information and have it ready when needed. Yet in real life, expecting an individual to do such a thing would be impossible, if simply for the fact that hospitals and insurers would never let a patient have all of that info in the first place, nor would an individual have the time or ability to make the data useful to share.
Seeing a need for a change (people should have their histories at the ready) and recognizing the impediments to making that happen (unwillingness by providers to share the info and inability of individuals to do much with it anyway) forward thinking companies saw both reward for themselves and for the public if they could find a solution to this problem. They relied on expanding technologies to make data compiling easier and more usable. They provided a compelling (and ongoing) sales pitch to providers and insurers that this healthcare IT investment will pay great dividends to them in both dollars and most importantly, medical outcomes for patients. And now we have a burgeoning healthcare innovation industry that is creating real, positive impact.
The long-term goal is that not only will patients be able to receive the right treatment for their immediate medical problems but that eventually a comprehensive system of information sharing will allow researchers to identify even better treatments and cures for most diseases. Sadly that time may be far in the future and too late for many, including Mr. Swayze, but there can be no argument that we have made great advances and will continue to do so. as long as there are people willing to ask the questions and look for solutions wherever they may be.
Now did healthcare IT come about because Dalton had the manila folder? Not likely. But then again, as is the beauty of innovation thinking, one of today’s IT innovators might have seen that movie all those years ago and the idea stuck in their head, so maybe it did. Either way, thank you Mr. Swayze and Godspeed.
Inside the Group is the brainstorming and discussion world of evolution firm Westfall | Group
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