There’s a trend towards empowerment of the individual and family through access to cloud tools. It’s a movement of responsibility and capability away from the experts and the authorities and the bosses towards the personal and the family unit and the peer group.
There are several big changes that are enabling that transition; one of the biggest is that computing power is getting so affordable that what used to be only the province of big corporations or big government, is now in the hands of smart phone users worldwide.
We know that for learning, ubiquitous information in forms that are readily usable makes a huge difference in what the individual can do for themselves. (DIY). This is also true for healthcare.
We are transitioning from a hierarchical structure to a horizontal structure in many ways of connecting and doing, and one of the most important implications of that change is that we’ll need fewer traditional experts, and more “increased capability intermediaries” that we might call guides or facilitators. Fewer gate keepers, and more assistants.
We’ll need more super teachers, but fewer traditional teachers….and more learning facilitators and guides on the side. We’ll need more super doctors but fewer traditional doctors…. and more health care facilitators and care counselors.
A global village indeed, where a shared responsibility for successful lives is based from the inside out, and bottom up….starting with the individual assuming “control of their own lives”, but dependent on a web of connectivity that far exceeds in capability and resources what tribes and villages used to have available.
For example, here’s a link to a online service that provides blood tests directly to individuals, who with results in hand are perhaps are no longer “patients”, and in a sense not just consumers either, because it’s about giving decision making power through having the knowledge available. DIY. Your doctor doesn’t want to order a test for whatever reason; DIY.
Of course it’s not that simple because information is only valuable in a quality context that we can make good decisions from. Healthcare bleeds into online education because one needs to learn the context, or how to navigate the context, in order to be able to act upon the information. We will need powerful AI, as well as powerful social media, and quality guides and facilitators to be able to assume these sorts of responsibilities. And we’ll still need super doctors to be involved as needed.
It’s not yet DIY healthcare by a long shot, but one can make huge strides toward becoming an active and integral part of the health care process, aided of course by online tools, big data analysis, online facilitators, and group support through social media. And that’s just for starters.
(how we structure health care costs rationally is another big hurdle in our way forward…but one can imagine that DIY healthcare would be more economically efficient by many X compared to what we have in the US today)