How to Survive the Coming Collision Between Tech and Healthcare

Soon you will be able to buy a discount ticket to go to a package of four big industrial shows: The Consumer Electronics Show, The International Auto Show, The Home Builder's Show, and the Wearable Technology Show. They all seem to be about the same thing—embedding sensors and monitoring things. Auto companies are buying AI, robotics, and advanced technology companies. Meanwhile, the clothing, auto, home building, and electronics industries all seem to be increasingly drawn to healthcare and wellness like moths to a flame. Under Armor is getting serious.

In the meantime, Sick Care is agonizingly attempting to migrate more to healthcare and disease prevention. They are like two parallel universes, fated to collide, possibly in New York, Chicago, or Orlando where the convention space is big enough to accommodate all the attendees who might be interested in attending. Or, they will just meet in your medicine cabinet.

Mobile stroke units, medical device cybersecurity, and wireless wearable sensors are among the topics poised to affect healthcare delivery over the next 12 to 18 months, according to the ECRI Institute's 2016 Top 10 Hospital C-suite Watch List.

Coherentcare will be the result and there will be many challenges:

1. Medical education will have to adapt to the prominence of data, data science, education, and training

2. People from different industrial cultures will have to learn to play nice together

3. Legislators and regulators will have to change the rules

4. Academic medical centers will have to lead, follow or get out of the way

5. Investment and business models will have to conform

6. Strategic alignments will have to happen

7. Upstream R & D paradigms, like corporate outposts, will evolve

8. Medical schools will have to change how they accept applicants

9. Digital health education and training will happen in industry before it happens in medical schools

10. To avoid myopic marketing, cable companies will no longer be railroads, but instead become data and information transportation companies

When annual medical annual meetings converge with this technotetrad, things will get more interesting. Just imagine all those great giveaways. Instead of those cheezy post-it notes and Tootsie Roll pops, you get to enter the raffle to win a smart refrigerator that will automatically call Whole Food to get more milk.