The first experience I can recall of Healthcare involved a world of payphones and pagers that we can remind ourselves of by watching this 1980’s BT pager ad:
Every so often a child contacts me (via the 3G Doctor website) about a project they are working on at school and more often than not I find in their email that there is more insight into future opportunities than I ever gleam from the various presentations I hear from eHealth/Health2.0 futurists who seem fixated on the idea that mobiles are only for people in Africa who don’t have a “proper computer”.
It’s for this reason that when anyone ever asks me what I think the future of mHealth will look like I always ask them to start by trying to frame their thoughts from the perspective of a future Doctor whose first memory of healthcare was her mother discovering and sharing information via youtube, connecting with other patients on patient communities, having her history taken by a mobile phone and video consulting with an informed Doctor:
To get your ideas going start by reflecting on how confusing our paper based reactionary healthcare system is going to be to future Doctors by watching this child working out that magazines are just iPads that don’t work: