An efficient market for healthcare services is a huge challenge for the US. How much farther along we are towards that goal with Obamacare is of course being debated, and in many respects, remains to be seen.
But what does that have to do with cloud services and learning? In brief, consumers of health care will need to become much more like practitioners of healthcare, using whatever tools available to accomplish that. One huge difference maker will be apps that help people DIY…and that will involve a LOT of ongoing learning.
A big part of that learning will be how to find value in healthcare services, and this story talks about some of the beginnings of that: forcing healthcare costs to be transparent and explicit.
(As we learned in the infamous Time Magazine issue “Bitter Pill”, and elsewhere, healthcare costs don’t exist in a rational data set, but in some world where the true cost of a treatment is often unknown to even those providing the treatment .)