So for my masters in design, I explored healthcare software, particularly the type which deals with patient medical records.
Healthcare software is a paradox to me, because it's so important to our society, but it's just kinda .... shit. After doing interviews and surveys, I can safely say that doctors and medical professionals feel the same. The software my GP uses was literally first put in place when I was born, and it hasn't changed since then.
There are many factors why healthcare software is bad, but one thing is for sure - most health IT systems are huge, complicated, monoliths. Most medical practices have a single system which does literally everything. This makes it super hard to swap out parts of the system to make improvements - you can't just improve say, the appointment management system without touching anything else - you have to do it all at once.
This makes 'upgrading' your healthcare software, stupidly hard, and stupidly expensive. The reality is that a doctor with the worlds best software, and a doctor with the worst will probably see the same amount of patients in a week - it's hard to justify when the cost can literally be in the [billions](http://barnett.surge.sh/welcome/intro.html)
So what's the future? I think there's three options.
1. Nothing changes, we keeping doing as we have for the last 30 years or so.
2. We break up the complexity of these systems, allowing for faster, iterative improvement. This is where my design proposal aims to sit.
3. A leap frog technology comes along, which either has huge value, or is super easy to implement. Machine learning and modern AI could be this, but it's a long shot, and cultural challenge.
So yeah, this is my thesis, hope you find it as interesting as I did.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 10.9 ms ] threadHealthcare software is a paradox to me, because it's so important to our society, but it's just kinda .... shit. After doing interviews and surveys, I can safely say that doctors and medical professionals feel the same. The software my GP uses was literally first put in place when I was born, and it hasn't changed since then.
There are many factors why healthcare software is bad, but one thing is for sure - most health IT systems are huge, complicated, monoliths. Most medical practices have a single system which does literally everything. This makes it super hard to swap out parts of the system to make improvements - you can't just improve say, the appointment management system without touching anything else - you have to do it all at once.
This makes 'upgrading' your healthcare software, stupidly hard, and stupidly expensive. The reality is that a doctor with the worlds best software, and a doctor with the worst will probably see the same amount of patients in a week - it's hard to justify when the cost can literally be in the [billions](http://barnett.surge.sh/welcome/intro.html)
So what's the future? I think there's three options.
1. Nothing changes, we keeping doing as we have for the last 30 years or so.
2. We break up the complexity of these systems, allowing for faster, iterative improvement. This is where my design proposal aims to sit.
3. A leap frog technology comes along, which either has huge value, or is super easy to implement. Machine learning and modern AI could be this, but it's a long shot, and cultural challenge.
So yeah, this is my thesis, hope you find it as interesting as I did.