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More Technologies That Will Change The World
from the so-much-changing! dept
People are fascinated with the ideas of "technologies that will change the world". Already, this year, we've posted articles about ten technologies that will change the world, six technologies that will change the world, another ten technologies that will change the world and technologies that people have suggested will change the world. Now, Fast Company weighs in with their list of five technologies that will change the world (apparently, they're not optimistic enough to go to ten technologies), including 3D printing, medical informatics, autonomic computing, fuel cells and RFID smart tags. Some of these are repeats from the other "change the world" articles. As always, there's a bit of hype in these predictions, but they're always useful in keeping on top of what future technologies people are working on.
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Institutional Resistance to Medical Informatics
The biggest obstacle to the advance of medical informatics isn't the technology, it's the entrenched institutional resistance. The health professions, especially hospitals, are full of salty ER types who argue that "computers don't know shit" and refuse to take them seriously.
Within health care professions, there is already a long tradition of resistance against the sharing of information: between doctors, between doctors and nurses, between hospitals, between health care providers and insurance companies, between insurance companies and regulators, between patients and health care providers, between patients and insurance companies. Nursing schools offer their "nursing informatics" programs which are totally different from "medical informatics", and they will get very angry if you ask them about "medical informatics". The primary mission of nursing informatics programs is to sabotage medical informatics and make them fail.
In a pattern that has recurred for the past 30 years, big university hospitals introduce fancy IT systems, which are then quickly sabotaged through the institutional resistance or ignorance. The implementation and training blows up into a huge political mess, the radiology department wants one thing and the ER nurses want another, and while the turf battles are going on, a few clueless computer technicians with high school educations are hired, the system has a massive failure, so it is scrapped.
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predicting the future is easy if no one checks up
Does anyone ever go back and look at these articles 10 or 20 years later and see how accurate they turned out to be?
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