When Siemens Health Services CEO John Glaser’s daughter graduated from medical school this past weekend, it was a proud day for her and for him.
“I gave her words of wisdom: You are as smart as you’ll ever be,” Glaser joked during a session at the Government Health IT Conference and Exhibition here on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s all down hill from here.”
The line drew chuckles from the crowd and simultaneously exemplified “the fundamental and material shift” that the ACA, HITECH, and the influx of health information technologies are currently driving — and much the way that the Web changed retail, Glaser suggested digitizing healthcare will yield a different industry.
“We’re going into a period of time where there’s significant change in the reimbursement sector,” Glaser said. And while it remains to be seen if that bends the cost curve or not there are, in parallel, structural changes in the industry demonstrated by the approximately 500 hospitals acquired since 2006, and the estimate that by decade’s end 25-35 percent of payments that providers receive will be risk-based. “Against that backdrop is the clinical and operational challenge on all of us.”
[Q&A: John Glaser's 4 facets of patient engagement.]
What’s more, healthcare — and other industries for that matter — is amid a fifth IT revolution, Glaser said, the likes of which come along roughly every decade. Think: mainframes in the 1960s, followed by mini-computers in the 70s, networked PCs throughout the 80s, and then the creation of the internet in the 90s.
“We’ve now gone through four and it’s an ecosystem change. Lots of things come together,” Glaser said, pointing to IBM opening DOS to Microsoft, the advent of VisiCalc and Ethernet all contributing to the PC era. “The one we’re in the middle of today is the notion of intelligent processors being attached to everything. We have this incredibly potent machine that is always networked, connected to the broader ecosystems.”
It’s not just the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, either. Glaser said that of all the microprocessors out in the world today, 20 percent are in mobile devices; the rest can be found within elevators, sensors, other devices.
“What is occurring beyond the ability to deliver location-aware applications is that it’s spewing out amazing amounts of data that enables us to do the choreographing of very complex processes,” Glaser said. For example, GPS monitoring the ongoing flow of traffic from automobiles feeding speed data, which can show that many are going slow in the same place and, in turn, caution drivers about traffic ahead and re-route them.
“This is the era in front of us, actually superseding the Web. In healthcare, frankly, we’re still learning how to leverage this,” Glaser said, which may help explain those bits of wisdom he imparted to his daughter. “It is difficult to know with any reasonable clarity what the year 2020 will look like. A lot of the specifics are unclear.”
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