Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The future is mediocre

Are you dissatisfied with the progress of technology?

Well, it turns out that you're a minority.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough

Wired magazine talks about how the need/want for convenience in the digital age has encouraged "just good enough" gadgets, information formats, you name it.

Ben Hescott, computer scientist extraordinaire (who I heard about this article from) says, with a snicker, that the RSA system that protects so much of our commercial and personal communication today is also "just good enough". It relies on an unproven assumption about the hardness of certain problems involving large prime numbers. This means that everytime you go on the internet, you are "just secure enough".


But there's more. This is the flip side of just-good-enough:

The last page of the article touches on Kaiser Permanente, an integrated healthcare organisation made up of for- and non- profit groups of entities, the largest of its kind in the country. I'm not really a fan of large corporations, and they have got some negative press in the past, but as of late August 2010, I have it on reliable account that they're trying to reinvent themselves not as the-cost-concerned-HMO but the-HMO-that-cares.

Here they are, at the cutting edge:

"In 2007, Flanagin and her colleagues wondered what would happen if, instead of building a hospital in a new area, Kaiser just leased space in a strip mall, set up a high tech office, and hired two doctors to staff it. Thanks to the digitization of records, patients could go to this "microclinic" for most of their needs and seamlessly transition to a hospital farther away when necessary...

What they found is that the system performed very well. Two doctors working out of a microclinic could meet 80 percent of a typical patient's needs. With a hi-def video conferencing add-on, members could even link to a nearby hospital for a quick consult with a specialist..."

This might have a developing world ring for some of you folks out there...

To me, What Kaiser is doing sounds great, especially in the world's-least-efficient healthcare system, where incredibly high costs, extreme bureaucracy, and poor incentives for doctors and healthcare providers trap people in inefficient and non-optimal plans and systems. Don't even get me started on the whole health insurance thing.

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