Bob Wachter

If Amazon or Netflix or you name your favorite disruptor comes up with a better mousetrap, the relationship is largely between a customer and the vendor.

And the customer says, this is better or cheaper or whatever, I'm going to buy it.

In healthcare, you have this assorted mishmash of insurance companies, businesses, government.

And also because healthcare is so important and we have the capacity to kill people if we don't do it right, it is highly regulated, which is yet another barrier for innovators to come in and disrupt us.

We like technology, but we like it in very, very specific ways.

We have not embraced it as a mechanism to make care better and safer and less expensive.

You call your book A Giant Leap.

I want to understand this concept of the giant leap.

My sense is you're arguing that healthcare...

Yeah.

The quote I like is Hemingway's quote from The Sun Also Rises.

Now, 100 years ago, one of the characters goes bankrupt and another character says, how does a man go bankrupt?

And famously, he says, two ways, gradually, then suddenly.

So that's us.

I mean, I think we have the gradually part down pat.

We now have computers, which is great, but we are the largest users of fax machines today.

In the country, we finally have ditched the pagers after the drug dealers did.

They were way ahead of us.

So, yeah, we are very sluggish in adopting new tools, but we have gone digital.

I wrote a book 10 years ago called The Digital Doctor, which was really about our transition from paper to digital.