Four For Friday | June 9, 2023

LF55 | A new take on EHRs, Minimum Viable Pilots, new AI Report and The Button

Welcome to a Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!

What’s the point of Electronic Health Records?

A fresh take on the electronic health record. What if instead of the bane of clinicians’ existence, electronic health records could be a source of innovation, insight and value? This intriguing report from the well-respected IHI shows how rather than clinicians resenting digital records as administrative burdens taking time away from care, EHRs can instead start to improve the quality of care and business outcomes. Shifting from their origins as clinical billing tools, providers are experimenting with ways they can predict outcomes, perform better triage and even help lower carbon emissions.

Corporate innovation with startups: enter the ‘MVP’

This piece published in the HBR a few years ago makes practical reading for anyone interested in creating successful startup pilots with corporates. Its formulation of ‘Minimum Viable Pilot’ is right on target for capturing the essence of a lean, results focused experiment, with the goal of a pilot being low cost insights. Or as the article puts it:

‘Minimum viable pilots represent the fastest, simplest, and cheapest test of a desirable “innovation attribute” to determine — with the least possible effort — its most likely business value to the firm.’

The future of AI and older adults

Laurie Orlov’s new report on AI is a good overview of the space, covering the Whys and Hows and highlighting some of those most active in the intersection of AI and aging. This quote summarises the direction of travel:

“In the future, AI in the home is likely to become part of a well-being infrastructure that is incorporated into new home design and home remodelling.”

The Button

A thoughtful discussion of the fast emerging future, when ‘The Button’ will dominate; this will be the way we calling up AI magic to create first drafts of our work. It will be ubiquitous, tempting, and change much of what we thought work was about.

Creating letters of recommendation, correspondence and business concepts used to require an investment of time and effort - it was a signal of quality and priority. Now output (and to some extent quality) is no longer directly correlated to input. Further, when an AI intelligence reads and triages the output of an army of AI content generators, it changes the human author into a less efficient anachronism.

The piece ends on a positive note - perhaps this evisceration of effort will allow us to spend less time on the meaningless work and more time doing what only we as unique humans can do. Let’s hope that’s the case.

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That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen