Why, given decades of innovation, hasn’t technology made more of a difference in how we access and receive healthcare?
This is the pressing question behind a important new book, Health Tech: Rebooting Society's Software, Hardware and Mindset, published by Routledge this fall and penned by futurist Trond Undheim (full disclosure, he now works with me at Tulip, the frontline operations platform). Through case studies and close readings, Undheim deftly shows how constant progress with analytics, edge technologies, and digital healthcare apps has been stifled by a lack of focus on implementing these innovations into the healthcare system.
To get the benefits of digital health, Undheim argues, we need to act now.
The bulk of the book is dedicated to contextualizing the current state of technology in healthcare. Undheim starts by providing a historical portrait of a stagnating industry, borne out by detailed organizational histories, and earnest attention paid to contingents that many authors would quickly write-off (anti-vaxxers). By the time the core argument of the book lands in chapter 9—that healthcare is in need of a broadscale, international, citizen-participatory ‘system reboot’—the reader is nodding along. By this point, Undheim has so carefully laid out the various actors, agents, and levers of change that if feels obvious when he suggests that, to reduce bottlenecks, technology needs to be more accessible, written in low-code and no-code which does not take a programming genius to tweak and adapt to new healthcare challenges as they arise. I concur, of course, given that Tulip, the scale-up company I co-founded out of MIT, builds on empowering frontline industrial workers in much the same way. As he points out, “AI alone cannot transform anything, AI-hype cannot either. People can” because [...] the sum of all tremendously interesting e-health applications could fail to transform the healthcare system”.
