I meet entrepreneurs with new healthcare ideas every day, and I’m happy to say that both the quality and the quantity of the ideas has improved very consistently in the last couple of years.
However, in the last months I can’t help having the impression that maybe we are under some sort of technology “bubble”, with lots of new medical devices that just improve “a little bit” what the previous one was doing… Improvement is fine, but we have the risk of adding more and more “qualities” to a product that the market does not need. Cost benefit analysis is always important in a cost constrained healthcare.
In other words, disruptive innovation is always… well, disruptive… brings new things to the marketplace that are needed, and therefore is always welcome. But incremental innovation may be entering sometimes a spiral of inflation, meaning we develop and invest in more and more things that really don’t add critical value to healthcare (while contributing to skyrocketing costs…).
Just a thought.
1 comments:
I think a good antidote for tech inflation is just starting from the problem (the need) instead of starting the solution (the technology).
More clinical doctors involved in health-care innovation is a good start point to change that mindset. Good for you!
Disruptive solutions are (by definition in the original paper in HBR) based on simpler/cheaper technology. Simpler, but good enough to cover the need of the consumer.
Good post.
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