“17 years for new medical practices to be adopted”: source

A tweet from South By Southwest by @DVanSickle led @epatientdave to finally blog about delays in medical adoption of new technologies - see full post here. It’s part of his presentation at the Kanter Family Foundation’s confab last May for their Learning Health System initiative. (Video of that speech is here.)

The issue is a statistic often quoted by advocates for improving medicine: “On average it takes 17 years for new practices to be adopted.” 

That’s pretty shocking – the idea that some doctors may not know something important to your university age kid, even if the info came out when that kid was in nappies!

The source turns out to be a paper published by the Institute of Medicine in their Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2000. 

Note:  I've managed to trace this trend all the way back to 1816 - when the stethoscope was invented. It took no less than two decades for it to be widely used. This is a health activist update