Crowd Powered Health Systems

This is an interesting read, a McKinsey article on research that they conducted to see how much social technologies could affect the workplace.  They claim that 20-25% gains in productivity can be achieved through fully implementing social technologies across an enterprise.  Let’s take a deeper look.

“The technologies, which create value by improving productivity across the value chain, could potentially contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value across the four sectors.  Two thirds of this potential value lies in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises.  But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35%, the time employees spend searching for company information.  Additional value can be realized through faster, more efficient, more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises.”

Cohealo’s solution acts as a social media app for the end users, which can be within a health system or across different health systems; allowing the users of medical devices the opportunity to connect and share devices.  By getting people off of phones and emails and away from texting, the Cohealo app can become a ‘smart’ system where all users can learn from previous interactions and transactions between partners.  This is the true collaboration and efficiency gained, not the one instance of searching and using the app, but the ever growing and refining of internal knowledge at every users fingertips.

“Companies that have a high proportion of interaction workers can realize tremendous productivity improvements through faster internal communication and smoother collaboration.  To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust.”

This is the tougher part, change.  Many end users have systems in place to track all assets, how do you put a new system in place that allows for sharing all assets?  Only in this scenario will you truly reach the optimal level of collaboration, knowledge sharing and efficiencies gained.