How Choice is Slowing Advancement in the Medical Industry

The new era of apps and technology have somehow slowed the technical progress of the medical industry … it sounds absurd, but please here me out.

For the purpose of this argument let’s just look at smart phones.

It seems that we can’t go anywhere today without hearing about the latest new mobile device, running the latest mobile operating system that promises to have thousands if not millions of apps. Even among the established two (being iOS and Android) the choice of applications is dizzying in its enormity. A quick search through the Android Market produced over 1600 results for “medical apps”, and the Android market is considered to be the least established of the two. Then you have the “other” mobile operating systems, each promising their own app stores (Microsoft, Blackberry, and HP/Palm). (That’s just smartphones, we haven’t even discussed all the newer wireless medical devices that transmit data through wifi, Bluetooth, cellular communication, or near field communication. Throw that on the pile and what we have are a lot of technical advancements with lots of choices to be made.)

With all these advancements and choices it has now become exceedingly difficult to actually choose. While there are a few medical apps that most users consider to be essential there are many others that people are either unaware of, or are being developed right now. Couple all this with IT departments trying to upgrade legacy systems, to enable digitized health records, telemedicine, etc. and what we have is slow forward progress.

IT departments have to first sift through all the available options, bearing in mind that in a few months a newer better option may exist. Then they have to determine how these options fit into their current architecture, or whether or not they fit at all. Also how do they migrate the existing data, into these new systems … Finally there is the “fear”. With the currently available platforms/software/apps, how does IT know which ones will last and advance? Which ones will become obsolete?

It’s endless and time consuming, and with the current speed of the development we have a lot of advancements with no choices being made.

It’s not that people don’t want to adopt these new technologies; it’s really just that there are too many choices, with no clear consensus on standards or how everything will work together. This is why a majority of the “popular” medical apps usually are reference applications that do not actually harness the full power of the mobile device.

That’s why although we are now designing and building tech, and medical tech at an accelerated rate the actual adoption and advancement of the industry has slowed.

How is one supposed to choose when there are so many choices?