Technology Transforming Healthcare

Information and knowledge technologies, both alone and embedded in other advancing technologies, will transform health care. These technologies become part of health care because they bring efficiencies until they reach a tipping point where health care cannot function without them. These technologies add to the complexity of health care further creating a complex adaptive system. They function as strange attractors, or focal points, for intense, persistent, and accelerating change, which transforms the culture and control mechanisms of health care. Such smart technologies as artificial intelligence combined with genomic and nanotechnologies may bring about such a radical change that we could not return to today’s health care system. For the transformation to be optimal, health care needs to address such issues as quality improvement processes, more intelligent electronic security, new control mechanisms, redefinition of the boundaries of health care enterprises, and a change from operating in discrete to continuous information flows.