Australian health IT sage looks back to the future and sees what went wrong
He’s a visionary in the field whose seminal 2004 BMJ paper
predicted the ways healthcare would be transformed by technology, but as we
approach his 2020 deadline Professor Enrico Coiera says companies have held
back progress and patients are still being put at risk.
It must have seemed such a long way away, but Coiera boldly foretold the future when he described a 2020 in which technology was assimilated into clinical practice.
“The world may be such that as a clinician you work in flexible virtual teams and some of your colleagues are computers. You would of course instinctively mistrust clinicians who always know the answer without consulting the information grid, and patients often choose to be the team leader,” Coiera, now Foundation Professor in Medical Informatics at Macquarie University and Director of the Centre for Health Informatics, wrote in 2004.
“Keyboards are banned as harmful and can be found in museums, next to punch cards and spittoons. The health record is a direct multimedia history of conversations, and a software agent is its curator. For the still cognitively limited clinician, your earring whispers your patient’s name when you meet.”
Keyboards remain and earrings are yet to whisper, but Coiera has greater disappointments when it comes to the pace of change. Read more
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Content owner: Australian Institute of Health Innovation Last updated: 19 Oct 2018 11:01am