Ariel D. Stern
Associate professor, Technology and Operations Management Unit, Harvard Business School
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15, 2023
3:10 PM 4:30 PM
“The digital revolution in health care: Challenges, opportunities, and the need for policy innovation”
New medical technologies have saved and improved millions of lives in recent decades. Yet the digital technologies that are transforming contemporary health care, such as digital medical devices, applications of medical software, and artificial intelligence tools to diagnose and treat patients would be unrecognizable to the 20th century architects of our regulatory and health care delivery institutions. For example, many digital health applications (apps) meet the formal definition of a medical device, yet their fully software-based nature means that many established practices for evaluating their safety and efficacy are mismatched to the dynamic nature of the apps themselves. The rapidly transforming scientific and technological foundations of medical invention, combined with the intense pace of innovation are thus increasingly mismatched to our existing institutional structures. This mismatch underlies many of today’s challenges in the commercialization of new products and creates a significant bottleneck to incorporating new innovations into care delivery. This talk will examine this mismatch by focusing on how the development and adoption of health care technology is shaped by the interaction between health care innovators, regulators, and our health care delivery institutions. The talk will also present policy and business model innovations that address some of the key challenges to technology adoption in this setting.
Registration at: Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society