[ This post is written for the WCIT2010 blog and cross-posted here ]

“A hospital is no place to be sick”, Samuel Goldwyn (from MGM) once said.

And he was right. Because ultimately nobody wants to be in the hospital. But we cannot deny the fact that everyone will be a patient sooner or later. Maybe short and only irregular if you’re lucky – or for long periods and often, if you are the not so lucky.

Healthcare is an industry. An industry that affects billions and employs millions. An industry means a business. And businesses are there to help their customers and offer products and services that they want. Well, they should.

The healthcare industry, and the medical field in general, has always been keen on technical innovation. During the last century some amazing technical innovations have seen the limelight: penicillin, the artificial kidney (invented by a Dutchie) or robotic surgery, just to name a few. And technological innovation growth seems to be exponential. Which means that we now see the developments in mobile (mhealth) and nan technology changing the face of healthcare.

But there are two even more important changes in healthcare (in my opinion).

The first is that healthcare is not about the patient – which is “bon ton” at the moment (search for patient-centered). Delivering and receiving healthcare is about a network of people involved: patients, e-patients, family, caregivers, insurer, colleagues etcetera.

The second import change is about the people that change healthcare. It is no longer only in the hands of professionals only (research, decision makers, CEOs). More and more often patients take control in creating the best healthcare experience there is. Wonderful examples of this can be seen in the stories of ePatientDave or Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald.

(checkout out the stories of ePatientDave of Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald).

Therefore innovation in healthcare is innovating the whole service: service design (with agencies like IDEO or 31volts showing the way). Technology is a part of an experience created by and for people. This thinking in networks, services and sharing has recently resulted in a new name that rightfully reflects what the future of healthcare is really about: participatory medicine. The Society of Participatory Medicine (and the accompanying Journal of Participatory Medicine) provide inspiration and pratical examples of how people together, information and technology can co-create a better future for healthcare. Because in healthcare you’re not alone.

Check out this presentation that shows Maarten Lens Fitzgerald story:

Every Thursday evening we come together. The #momoams team: @vangeest @panman @marcfonteijn @samwarnaars and me. I like those meetings – a lot. They’re personal, on the edge and energetic. Trends, future scenarios and the latest gadgets all are part of the conversation (and we also do some event planning in between too :-)

Last week on our mailinglist @vangeest mailed a link to an article on Edge.org from Frank Schirmacher called The Age of the Informavore.

I watched the video and I’m blown away.

Really. It’s an more than excellent talk about how technology influences people and our society. It may seem like dry stuff, but really after watching this video you might very will think different. (On of the funny things in the video, considering the topic, btw is the sound of new mail coming in every now and then at Schirrmacher’s computer :-)

I have added the video below and added paraphrases of some of my favorite parts of the interview also (I can’t take credit for any of the content, they’re all Frank Schirrmacher’s, just see them as my highlighted parts). But actually, go over to Edge.org and read the full article (including excellent links and more info)! It’s more than worth it. Thanks again to @vangeest for sharing!

• There seems to be an explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them
• When you view attention as food for information, we are now in a food crisis. That’s when dynamics of Darwinian selection kick in. Which ideas survive? Which thinking succeeds and which doesn’t?
• The human is an informavore, it’s eating information. But just as with food it has to decide what take, what not to take, whether something has good or bad calories, whether it’s healthy etcetera
• We are experiencing a cognitive revolution, much of what we are thinking is stored less in the lived life and more in systems linked to knowledge: Facebook, blogs etcetera
• In the 19th century it was talked about that muscles had to adapt to the machines, in the 20th century we see the same question but now with the brain. We face issuess with e.g. multi-tasking.
• There will be major issues with the tools developed, especially predictive search versus free will. Issues about the way we predict and the way we ARE predicted
• Three important 19th century principles return – but in a different way – regarding information and society: Darwinism (who survives in the Net), Communism (question of free), Taylorism (people see themselves not capable anymore of keeping up with the system)
• The realtime nature of the information has #iran already competing with @parishilton. You also already information cascades to influence this not only by humans, but also by bots
• Kafka and Shakespeare in their time translated reality into literature – we need to find people that can do this on the level of software. George Dyson e.g. has done this very well in the article Turings Cathedral about his visit to Google: “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built.”
• People tend to forget heuristics, e.g. the ability to calculate as machines will do that for us.