Nick Webb
FUTURIST

[spacer height=”40px”]So if innovation is a new thing we have to learn. Then we have to accept the fact that we are in fact innately innovative. And the other day I was at the University and a colleague of mine introduced me to somebody and they did something really weird. And as my 12 year old daughter would say icky right.

They introduced me as inventor. They go Hey this is Nick Webb. He’s an inventor. Look at the person next to you and shake their hand and say Hi I’m an inventor.

I have no reason to have you do that other than to share the pain of that moment with you guys. You’re welcome. But you know it’s interesting when you think about it that’s kind of like saying hi I’m a breather. Of course we’re an inventor. It’s what we do, right. We observe and we transmute those observations into the material equivalent of a thing or an experience or a solution or a clinical pathway or an intervention of some sort. Right. That’s what I believe is the greatest opportunity for this audience is to leverage the genesis of that incredible philosophy of patient centrism and to drive it with innovation. So it begs the question What is innovation. And in my upcoming coming book The Innovation mandate after interviewing over 3000 innovation experts. I’ve only kind of aggregated their definitions because none of them were the same. And here’s what they told me and here’s what I believe the best definition is is that innovation is simply nothing more than finding new ways to deliver value to your organization and to the patients or customers that you serve. It’s really just that simple. And when you think about the future of health care here are the trends that I think are going to affect you in the biggest way. Hyper consumerization. Now I know it’s horrible to hear the term consumer when you’re thinking about patients because you know they’re coming to us for clinical and safe efficacious care after all.

But it turns out in a time of hyper consumerization if we don’t leverage the power of experience design. We’re going to lose the opportunity to serve those patients. There is no question you can’t find a hospital or a clinic of any size whatsoever that doesn’t have a formal CX or PX strategy meaning that they’re looking at the patient’s journey. They’re understanding them beyond ethnography they’re looking at them in terms of the way in which they behave digitally through netnography. They’re watching their journey across five well-defined touch points. They’re understanding their personas across those five touch points. And as a result of that they’re delivering beautiful experiences. And in many cases displacing other caregivers because their experience is like Amazon. The other issue that will affect us all in the next 10 years is the acceleration of disruption. You know one thing I’d like you to consider is this is that we all suffer from a condition that I like to call Disruption Dysphoria, meaning that it’s so easy. I’ve been in health care for four decades. I remember my first job working with Star Surgical and the first foldable inter-ocular lens and I can remember the executive telling me this is a burning platform it’s coming to an end but it never did in fact it didn’t even change that much. So it’s easy for us to believe that the changes in health care are linear they are not. So we have to accept the fact that disruption is somewhat sporadic it’s deep and it’s fast.

The other thing that will affect you in a very very big way is connection architecture. There is a reason why Apple and Google are fighting right now to own the patient as a digital node. They will own the patient as a digital node. By that mean their data signals a pulse oximetry, EEG, EKG, movement, gait, states of mind, everything can easily be monitored through continuous monitoring. Super cheap. These wearables will likely be in ear technologies that allow us to easily access EEG data. We are going to turn patients… this is all good…this is not Orwellian and scary…we’re going to turn them into digital nodes so that artificial machine, artificial intelligence can look at the meaning of the signals of the data off digital nodes. And what we can do from that is leverage anticipatory healthcare. I think it’s more important even than genomics and pharma genomics. The other issue is the health care systems that you see today are going to have to change and they’re gonna change in a very positive and beautiful way. We’re going to provide more access to more underserved populations. We’re going to deliver those. We’re gonna have the opportunity to spend time with patients and to engage them the way that only DO’s really care about. We’re going to really provide the models that support what you’ve built up believed for decades.

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