For the past decade technologists have been on a mission to disrupt medicine the same way they’ve disrupted practically every other societal system - from the bottom up, by the consumers of healthcare. This would entail replacing much of what doctors do by AI and big data in the cloud and, ultimately, the “Uber-ization of Healthcare”. The result would magically be lower costs and better outcomes.
But my recent work in the digital health space has shown that we technologists can’t approach medicine the same way we’ve approached media and music. Healthcare is a different beast. Anyone who thinks that apps and data alone are going to convince people to change their health-related behaviors - which is the only way to lower costs and improve outcomes at scale - is simply ignoring human nature.
Twine Health was founded on the belief that the real opportunity for technology in healthcare is to strengthen, not weaken, critical human-to-human relationships in the system. We have developed a Collaborative Healthcare IT platform, based on six years of research at the MIT Media Lab, with that principle in mind. We have demonstrated that when patients with chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes are empowered to take the lead in their health, but with the continuous support and caring of their clinical team, costs drop dramatically and outcomes are greatly improved.