Book: “Beginning of Infiniti”
I started this interesting book my brother gave me for Christmas. An underlying premise of the book is that knowledge breakthroughs come from new paradigms envisioned through creative thought, rather than through deduction and induction only after empirical observation. That these breakthroughs are validated when they prove resistant to falsification. Criticism is critical for this process, since without criticism no one would attempt to prove the new ideas false. It seems the genesis of the amazing technology advances we have experienced as a society are with the relatively small ranks of those who could think and process this way. It is amazing to think about the technological advances inherent in something as commonplace as a smartphone. Those in society considered progressive in the application of technology don’t really deserve credit for the breakthroughs, it’s just that they were willing to quickly accept and embrace new paradigms because they see empirical advantages. What does this have to do with healthcare & IT? I think healthcare IT is so challenging because we in healthcare were not a part of the creative genesis in new technology paradigms – neither were we early to adopt the new paradigms being among the most resistant – neither have we generally been fully open to criticism and accepting of new paradigms (i.e. calling evidence based medicine “cookbook” medicine). As a friend of mine recently commented – “Why did the government have to commit billions of dollars to get healthcare to adopt IT, when other industries did this on their own?” But alas — I believe we have seen considerable progress and the federal government’s “Meaningful Use” incentives have accelerated progress considerably and there is great potential for the tipping point to be reached whereby we do see a positive transformation in our nation’s healthcare system with information technology advances being a key enabler.