Why do we need to change the way we use hospitals?
In 1954, Johnny Cash walked into the audition room at Sun Records.
At the time, he was a nobody. He was selling appliances door-to-door and playing gospel songs at night. He was broke, and his marriage was in ruins.
Cash decided to sing a gospel song for his audition. It’s what Cash knew best. What’s more, gospel was popular in 1954. Everyone else was singing it.
The audition, as depicted in the movie Walk the Line, doesn’t go as Cash planned. As Cash begins to sing a dreary gospel song, the record label owner Sam Phillips feigns interest for all of thirty seconds before interrupting Cash.
“We’ve already heard that song,” Phillips scoffs. “A hundred times. Just like that. Just like how you sang it.” This song, he says, is the “same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day, about your peace within, and how it’s real, and how you’re gonna shout it.” He asks Cash to sing “something different, something real, something you felt” because that’s the kind of song that truly saves people.
“It ain’t got nothing to do with believing in God, Mr. Cash,” Philips says. “It has to do with believing in yourself.”
This rant jolts Cash out of his conformist, let-me-sing-you-some-good-old-gospel attitude. It brings out the part of him that’s been buried down by a crushing mortgage, a stale marriage, and too many years in the Air Force.
He collects himself, starts strumming his guitar, and begins singing Folsom Prison Blues in that deep, distinctive voice of his.
At that moment, he stops trying to be a gospel singer.
He becomes Johnny Cash.
He walks out of the audition room with a record contract.
What does that mean for disrupting a century-old way healthcare is provided? Do we need to follow the herd or should we start new ways to disrupt and innovate healthcare as we know it today?
We assume erasing our fingerprints from our work and following the herd makes it safe. We hide behind what’s expected and what’s accepted. We’d rather be wrong collectively — we’d rather fail singing the same gospel song that everyone else is singing — than risk failing individually. So we chase trends, adopt the latest fad, and, as Cash would say, walk the line.
Today, we need to democratize and decentralize the primary care and outpatient monitoring ecosystem in health care.PONS is focused on creating medical imaging networks by developing AI-driven consumer ultrasound technology allowing doctors to remotely scan, and monitor patients without needing to call them to the hospital.
As such, we took a step back and envisioned, how will healthcare look in 2030 in a decade? From now, we hope we will live in a world where everyone has access to health care.
Now you may ask, all of this could be enabled by one simple but fundamental shift in technology decentralized healthcare. Today, we’re seeing a continuing and concerning trend where cities are building more and more hospitals to meet the demands of their growing populations. This may solve the problem for now, but it’s incredibly expensive and not sustainable for the long term. So we began to think whether, in 2030, hospitals could consist of only crucial elements that require patients to be on site. All the other functions could be redistributed and made entirely mobile in a network of hyper-connected autonomous vehicles.
But let me share another use case, which explores this potential. Once you have this mobile unit, you can start to configure it to the specific needs of specific populations. Here. We see clusters of vehicles moving around town to manage population based on specific community needs. Various VE combinations could create pop-up environments for services such as health screening, respiratory treatment, or geriatric care. In times of emergency. These adaptive clusters will provide a dynamic response for incidents, natural disasters, or global pandemics, such as COVID 19 managing all of this from a care coordination center. The health system controller constantly evaluates the needs of each situation, redirecting relevant medical vehicles and resources to efficiently form proper hospitals. Could this be the future of decentralized healthcare, where we’re able to bring healthcare to you in your moment of need?
The consumer — rather than health plans or providers — will determine when, where, and with whom he or she engages for care or to sustain well-being. Over the next 20 years, all health information will likely become accessible and — with appropriate permissions — broadly shared by the consumers who own it.
“Value-based payment … is the future. So, make no mistake: If your business model is focused merely on increasing volume rather than improving health outcomes, coordinating care, and cutting waste, you will not succeed under the new paradigm.”
