It’s time for tech to put the human touch back into healthcare

I’m sick of hearing that “healthcare is broken.” Google broken health care system — you’ll get 97 million results.

Healthcare is not broken. That all-or-nothing characterization doesn’t work when we’re talking about such a complex industry. It overshadows the fact that we are living in a glorious time scientifically and experiencing a veritable renaissance in our understanding of the human body.  

We discovered penicillin less than 100 years ago. That is literally a blip in the timescale of humanity. Much of what we consider to be modern medicine was born in the period since, including antibiotics that drove out infection as a top killer and vaccines that eradicated horrendous diseases like polio and smallpox. In the last 100 days alone, we’ve witnessed the first-ever FDA approval of gene therapy for an inherited disease.

These advancements have significantly elongated life expectancy; we live almost 40% longer today than we did 100 years ago. This progress has also paved the way for targeted, personalized medicine that we will all likely benefit from in our lifetimes. So no, healthcare is not broken. It is magnificent and awe-inspiring. Where we’re falling down is how we organize and deliver healthcare. It just isn’t keeping up with the complex care needs that come from people living longer and often with multiple chronic diseases.

As Zeke Emanuel and Ann Lamont recently noted, we’re past relying on policymakers to address the problems with delivering and financing care. Instead, startups are leading healthcare transformation by driving technology and innovation in the delivery system.

While high-tech medicine is speeding along, we’re experiencing an acute shortage of doctors, particularly primary care providers. Those we have are burning out because we make them click boxes all day and close medical records all night and weekend. It’s telling that more than half of physicians report feelings of burnout in survey after survey.

We have devalued the human touch at the center of delivering healthcare and forced people in the trenches of this work into horrendous workflows. So while patients should be able to turn to primary care to help them navigate care, there’s only so much that doctors can do with limited time, information, and enablement.

Technology can have an immensely positive impact in addressing these challenges. Consider, for example, that over 70 percent of people with depression turn to their primary care doctor for answers. The reality is that those providers often don’t identify underlying mental health issues, and even when they do, they don’t have the resources and support to get their patients the care they need.

By designing algorithms to recognize the characteristics of underlying mental health conditions, we can proactively recognize when patients could benefit from specialized care. We can also use sophisticated matching algorithms and modes of modern communication to connect those people to the treatment pathway most likely to work for them, all with the primary care physician at the center of their care.  

The potential goes beyond improving mental health. Tech companies can, and should, build products to help those on the front lines: empowering providers with a full picture of patient health, seamlessly connecting primary care to specialist networks, and making efficient collaboration possible.

These are the things we know how to do well in the technology world. Unfortunately, much of the technology in the healthcare system to date was designed to meet the needs of administrators and bureaucrats rather than the end users. I’m confident if we refocus our efforts on the actual providers and teams delivering patient care, technology can be a catalyst in putting the caring back into healthcare.