“A disruptive technology is an innovation providing a product or service that is so compelling that everyone rapidly abandons their current way of doing things and flocks to what is new.”

— Hank C. Lucas Jr., University of Maryland

In an archipelagic country like the Philippines, with a healthcare delivery system lagging behind some of its neighbours, disruptive technologies offer us new ways of looking at old problems. They may also offer cost-effective solutions to healthcare problems that have been with us for decades—problems we often blame on lack of resources.

Here are some innovations in healthcare that might already be knocking at our doors. The infographic below is from Bertalan Meskó, the Medical Futurist.

[Retain original infographic here]

Here are my top three disruptive innovations that might change the way we handle healthcare in the Philippines.

1. Internet and social media

The information explosion brought by the internet has had a tremendous effect on healthcare. Access to medical information and collaborative work has never been easier or faster.

Social media, on the other hand, has given us another tool for engaging patients and encouraging a more participatory type of medicine.

2. Massive Open Online Courses

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have changed access to learning and education. Healthcare education is already beginning to explore this innovation, although perhaps more slowly here in the Philippines.

We definitely still need formal, face-to-face, institution-based medical education. But other areas of healthcare learning—healthcare systems and models not usually taught in medical school, for example—can also be learned through MOOCs.

MOOCs may help reduce the prohibitive cost of further education and address some of the “lack of resources” for learning that we often complain about in the academe.

3. Telemedicine

Don’t have a healthcare professional in your location? Perhaps you can video chat with a physician elsewhere.

Don’t have a colleague nearby to refer to or work with in managing a patient? Perhaps you can teleconference with another doctor.

The potential impact of this innovation on healthcare is enormous. In a country where healthcare delivery is greatly affected by geography, limited human resources, and prohibitive costs, telemedicine offers another way of addressing healthcare problems that remains underused.

Of course, there are other disruptive innovations I could add to the list. Some have not yet “landed” on our shores, while others are probably still experimental in their use for healthcare in the Philippines.

Three-dimensional printing and bioprinting, for example, are being explored for tissue replication. In orthopedics, 3D printing technologies are also being studied for applications involving bone and cartilage.

So, which of these disruptive technologies do you think might help us solve some of our healthcare problems in the Philippines?