Kathie Melocco - Health Activism

Blog dedicated to Social Justice and Health and Wellbeing Activism

March 22, 2013

Should HealthCare Be More Like The Airline Industry?

This great article  discusses how there will be pain associated with transforming healthcare as we move towards a more participatory style of medicine and it is going to require dramatic and gut wrenching changes. 


It compares the dramatic cost cutting of the airline industry to healthcare. At first I thought not, but the proposition is an interesting comparison. 

"It's the fact that U.S. commercial airlines carried 52% more people in 2010 than they did in 1995, and yet they employed 2% fewer people. It's that airlines did away with unprofitable luxuries such as meals in coach and filled excess flight capacity. It's that airlines shed lots of jobs at front counters and reservation call centers and replaced them with kiosks and online bookings."


Think other sectors such as banks' use of ATMs to let customers do self service, and to retailers such as Amazon.com and Wal-Mart using analytics to acquire a better understanding of their customers and their own operations.

Think what has happened to retailers who avoided online strategies....


The big number is this: Healthcare must be cheaper. That's not going to happen without pain and radical change. And that is the core message. Technology is an enabler, it helps increase efficiencies in costs and productivity.

In Australia, where healthcare professionals are still largely resistant and slow to adopt such simple technologies as online health appointment booking services despite clear evidence that consumers want greater convenience in accessing health appointments.


It's going to take changes in how health care practitioners do business.


In health, consumers should be a participating partner.


In fact much of e-Patient Dave's message when he visits Australia in late June this year will be exactly about these very developments and the need for health care practitioners and consumers to work in partnership together. He advocates loudly 'Let Patients Help! and Give Me My Damn Data!


A number of startups in this area are working hard to enrol and engage with health professionals in what is evident to all will eventually be the way of the future. 


So let's take it to the next step. Imagine if there was a health kiosk available in consumer friendly locations where you could check in during flu season or more.


Well it now exists - welcome to the brave new world converging on medicine - data, technology and human genomics.


Welcome to HealthSpot!






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