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© 2011, 2012 Health Futures Digest
David Ellis’ Hospitals & Health Networks Column
| Surprise, Revisited | Health care institutions are riding a tsunami of change, but that’s no reason to be caught by surprise. | 2013-11-19 |
| Health Care as Usual in a Jobless Economy? | Machines are taking over jobs not only of laborers, but of teachers and even parents. What does this mean for the future of health care institutions? | 2013-09-17 |
| Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of Surgery | David Bouwman, M.D. retired on May 31, having served 38 years in the department of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine. David Ellis made marginal contributions toward Bouwman’s advancement of the technology and pedagogy of surgical simulation, which, as regular readers of this column will know, are central to medicine and surgery of the future. | 2013-07-16 |
| The Explosion of Computing Power | Computers are getting faster, and they’re getting faster more quickly. | 2013-05-21 |
| Modern vs. Postmodern Medicine | A conservative provider mindset may be the biggest drag on “postmodern” medicine — personalized, regenerative, bionic and digital. | 2013-03-28 |
| Health Literacy | Accelerating medical discovery hinders health literacy, and subsequently patient safety, especially (although not exclusively) in the developing world. We believe that the situation is temporary and that increasingly smart technology eventually will obviate the need for human functional literacy in health care. With Ramana Yashaswi, MS. | 2013-01-22 |
| Telehealth in the Developing World | Telehealth is emerging as the only viable way to bring modern medicine to most citizens of developing countries. It may become the only viable way to provide access to many in the United States, too. With Ramana Yashaswi, MS. | 2012-11-20 |
| Delegating Authority to Machines | Acceleration renders innovation unmanageable to the human brain, but not to artificial intelligence. Fairly soon, hospitals must and will devolve more and more authority, including even clinical authority, to machines, and should be prepared for some of the potential downsides. | 2012-09-18 |
| Rehearsing Surgery on a Specific Patient, Virtually | Applying gaming technology to surgery will enable physicians to develop and practice revolutionary procedures on a model of the patient who will undergo the procedure. With Charles J. Shanley MD., J. Edson Pontes MD., Donald W. Weaver MD., and Gregory W. Auner PhD. | 2012-07-17 |
| The Lure of New Devices in the OR | When a medical supply company starts marketing its products to surgeons, surgeons start wanting those products despite a lack of evidence that they improve outcomes. Over time, some new devices prove their worth; others are discarded, and money is wasted. Surgeons need help determining which devices likely will make a difference. With J. Edson Pontes MD, Donald Weaver MD and Charles Shanley MD. | 2012-05-15 |
| Primary Care in 2025 | What are the forces shaping the future of primary care, and what is that shape? These are among the key questions posed in a just-released study by the Institute for Alternative Futures. With Clement Bezold, PhD. | 2012-03-20 |
| Medical Tourism: Promise or Peril? | Is medical tourism a serious threat and, if so, how might U.S. hospitals combat it? With J. Edson Pontes, MD. | 2012-01-17 |
| Leveraging Personalized Medicine | Futurist David Ellis suggests that personalized medicine may offer better odds for patients than traditional medicine. Podcast of interview with Richard Hill. | 2011-11-28 |
| Personalized Medicine: A Dinner Discussion | The authors share their thoughts on whether the clinical trial will become obsolete. WithJ. Edson Pontes, M.D., and Donald Weaver, M.D. | 2011-11-15 |
| Genomic Medicine Today | Advances in genomic medicine have put us on the road to brand new forms of treatment. With Ramesh Babu Batchu, PhD. | 2011-10-13 |
| Robot Doctors | Machine intelligence is replacing human intelligence, but that’s no reason for despair. | 2011-09-08 |
| Dr. Watson, Game Show Celebrity and Physician’s Assistant | An artificial intelligence system, Dr. Watson will soon see anyone, anywhere, at any time, and deliver better quality diagnoses at lower cost than any other doctor. | 2011-06-09 |
| The Future of Long-Term Care | In the future, hospitals will be reduced to handling only critical care and trauma, and fewer physicians will be needed. With Charles H. Roadman II, MD. | 2011-04-19 |
| Accelerating Change | A “mediasphere” dominated by tweets and soundbites indicates a growing need for analytics and analysis. | 2011-02-07 |
| Getting Full Value From the EMR | Advanced analysis of electronic medical record data will help hospital leaders make process and clinical improvements. With Stephen W. Loree. | 2010-12-20 |
| The Future of Personal Health Records | PHRs require considerable attention from the patient, do not talk to one another and are built on a shaky centralized foundation. To reach their true potential, PHRs must become largely invisible, communicate with each other, and remain a network of information stored in various locations. With Stephen J. Cavanagh. | 2010-10-04 |
| Creative Medicine | Microscopic, human-created life-forms that produce vaccines or medications will soon be part of physicians’ arsenal of treatments. | 2010-08-09 |
| Hope in Health Care | Technology is the path to cutting costs. With Charles J. Shanley, MD. | 2010-06-07 |
| The Human Touch | Can robots and Web sites be adequate healing proponents for patients? | 2010-04-26 |
| Genomic Medicine | The benefits of gene therapy become clearer by the day. A U.K. report offers recommendations that may have near-term application for U.S. hospitals. | 2010-02-08 |
| Crystal Balls | How to predict the future of a hospital in a period of accelerating and tumultuous change. | 2009-12-07 |
| Brain-Enhancing Drugs | Medications that improve mental functioning are already in use. The medical community needs to respond to the ethical, business and other issues they raise. | 2009-10-26 |
| Wireless and Other Revolutions | Losing the landline is just the beginning of the Wi-Fi revolution. | 2009-08-03 |
| Robot Ethics | Before we forge ahead with surgical and nursing robots, we need to think about the ethical implications of these emergent technologies. With Stephen J. Cavanagh and Barbara K. Redman. | 2009-06-22 |
| Virtual Medicine | Advances in video games will change how physicians practice medicine. With Benjamin Mercer and James C. Rosser Jr., MD. | 2009-04-28 |
| Mental Superhealth | A new article and book highlight the future of neuro-enhancements. With Christopher Green. | 2009-02-10 |
| Forecast for Retail Clinics: Heading Upward | Despite some setbacks in the market, retail clinics face a climate that favors their growth. | 2008-12-16 |
| The Globalization of Health Care | Medical students, patients and health care organizations are increasingly crossing oceans to receive training, undergo surgery or find new patients. With Charles J. Shanley, MD. | 2008-10-21 |
| To Beam or Not to Beam | That is the question facing health systems in southeast Michigan. | 2008-08-26 |
| Prophecy’s Pitfalls | A lesson in health care careers of the future. | 2008-06-03 |
| A Call for Teamwork | An NICU nurse, fearing for the life of a premature infant, disobeys the attending physician’s orders. His story illustrates the importance of collaborative care. With Charles J. Shanley, MD. | 2008-04-08 |
| The Mobile PC | Cell phones are taking the place of the PC, while EMRs now fit on a swipe card. | 2008-02-26 |
| A New Approach to Medical Education | Medical schools need to abandon the concept of medicine as art and begin training students to function in a rapidly evolving, team-oriented, science-based field. With Charles J. Shanley, MD. | 2007-11-15 |
| Retail Clinics: A Disruptive Innovation | Retail Clinics: A Disruptive Innovation. The accelerating rollout of retail clinics is shaking up the status quo. | 2007-10-09 |
| Digital Integration and the Future of Surgery | Digital Integration and the Future of Surgery. With Charles J. Shanley, MD, | 2007-08-14 |
| Progress in Cancer and Neurodegenerative Diseases | Advances in genetics, imaging and medications are chipping away at two frightening age-related killers–and at the dire predictions of boomer-driven physician shortages. | 2007-06-12 |
| Post-Modern Medicine: Regeneration | Within 20 years, some believe, regenerative medicine will be providing treatments– including many cures– for a raft of diseases and conditions. If that happens, current predictions of health care costs and clinician shortages may not be worth much. | 2007-04-10 |
| The Next Big Thing | Second Life, or a more real, virtual-world version of the Web, is on its way. It will transform medicine at least as radically as the Web has. | 2007-02-13 |
| The Growing Impact of Health Information Technology | Health information technologies include more than just electronic medical records. Gene banks, scanner images, biomonitoring sensors–the national health information network will need to include data from all of these technologies. | 2006-12-17 |
| Aging: Not What It Used to Be | Projections that the baby boomers will tax our health system have failed to take technological advances into account. | 2006-08-08 |
| Mitochondrial Medicine | The new field of “mitochondrial medicine” offers a whole new perspective on the study, diagnosis and treatment of disease. With Lawrence I. Grossman PhD, Maik Hüttemann PhD, and John Kamholz MD. | 2006-06-16 |
| It’s Time to Take Your Telemedicine | Within a few years, telemedicine could become the first line of health defense if employers, the insurance industry, Medicare, Medicaid and providers would only heed the evidence that telemedicine improves quality of care while lowering cost. | 2006-04-10 |
| Changing the Foundations of Medicine | Cool clinical minds are waxing rhapsodic over nanomedicine. Is their enthusiasm warranted? | 2005-11-16 |
| The Future of Imaging | Super-strong CT scanners and smarter technologies. | 2005-09-14 |
| Stemming the Tide | Globalization is beginning to affect the US health care industry | 2005-08-14 |
| The Two Sides of Molecular Medicine | In just the last few months, researchers have made mind-boggling progress in molecular medicine. But this means that doctors, already uncomfortable with evidence-based medicine, now need to apply evidence-based molecular medicine. We need a better system for evidence review. | 2005-06-14 |
| The Promise of Stem Cell and Other Therapies | With stem cells and polymers, physicians are regrowing bones and researchers are making spine-injured animals walk again. | 2005-04-12 |
| Reduced Time to Insight | At the World Technology Network’s annual meeting, some of the world’s most innovative leaders in health care technologies described the accelerating pace of medical discoveries. | 2005-01-17 |
| Robots in the OR | In the author’s view, there are no limits to the tasks that robots can do in surgery–or the improvements they can make in quality of care. | 2004-12-14 |
| The Eroding Patient-Doctor Relationship | As patients turn to emerging technologies for better care, they lose trust in their physicians. | 2004-09-09 |
| What if … | The Consequences of Innovation. | 2004-08-13 |
| Don’t Be Surprised | Inertia in the hospital industry gives an illusion of invulnerability to the revolutionary impacts of technology. | 2004-08-12 |
| Health Care Costs and the Acceleration of Innovations | High-tech medicine is often blamed for rising costs, but technology prices usually decrease dramatically, especially when a large number of patients can take advantage of innovations. | 2004-06-07 |
| HIMSS Award Book Smart |
The tome, Technology and the Future of HealthCare: Preparing for the Next 30 Years, by David Ellis, is copublished by Jossey-Bass and AHA Press | 2002-07-01 |