It’s widely recognized that health care must change. Paper charts are still commonly used, providers communicate via fax, and patients wait weeks for an appointment. Given the recent excitement around health information technology and the unusual political will, it may seem not only that health care is ripe for disruption, but that it may even happen.

Or will it? Disruption is one of those “know it when you see it” kind of things. By lowering the costs of distribution for content providers, the Internet, for example, has unmistakably changed, and continues to change, the media industry. Or, if you don’t like that, you can try wikipedia’s take. There is a lot about health care that feels like pre-Internet media: insular, capital-intensive, multiple stakeholders (read: middlemen). And so, it feels as though health care will be disrupted, but where and how can that reasonably happen?

Continue reading Can Health Care Be Disrupted? on the Symcat blog.