The health care sector is a very sensitive sector that the government of any nation would not wait to see a crisis similar to that witnessed in the banking sector. Even though Clayton Christensen was not the first person to research and write on the subject of correcting the problems facing the health care sector, his book, The Innovator’s Prescription, remains a notable application since he applied a successful problem identification model and research to the health care sector. He considers fixing the healthcare as involving an innovation, whereby, there is a shell that should be kept while rewriting the main story.
According to Christensen, the hospitals and healthcare providing organizations are profit-oriented organizations. Therefore, it is important to implement the business model in these organizations followed by a reformulation and update consistent with the prevailing information and market behavior. He continues to advice in this book that if a change is not effected on the implemented business model, it becomes outdated, ineffective and susceptible to disruption by a more innovative and insightful provider (Christensen, Grossman, & Hwang, 2008).
In this book, Christensen gives the three components of disruption as follows. First, a technology that transforms a technical problem into a simple solvable and achievable phenomenon, secondly, a business model that is capable of taking the simplified solution to market at a low cost; and finally a supporting cast of suppliers and distributors with consistent business models comprising the value network (Christensen, Grossman, & Hwang, 2008).
Currently, all sectors, the healthcare sector inclusive are moving towards technological applications. The major reason for this transformation is the reduction of cost in these sectors. Reduction of cost implies reducing the production costs as well as the cost of acquiring the products and services provided in these sectors. Additionally, in the health sector, as earlier identified by Christensen in his book, The Innovator’s Prescription, there has been a gap in the health education sector. He describes this gap as the situation whereby the student doctors are limited in the things that they see and experience in each rotation, by the events present during the rotation. According to him, the students need a technology that ensures they get the right lessons at the appropriate time. Therefore, in his writings, including the Innovator’s Dilemma, he describes disruptive and sustaining technologies that are applicable in health education. Disruptive technologies according to Clayton Christensen have features that a few fringe values of the students. Sustaining technologies on the other hand improve the performance of established systems (Christensen, 1997).
According to Christensen, while referring to an accountant teacher at BYU, he gives credit to online technologies in education. He indicates that students at the Harvard Business School had opted to access the BYU online accounting lectures instead of their school programs. He also cites Walter’s Physics course, which has 5 million people. He considers these teachers as the best in the world. Therefore, in healthcare education, he considers online technologies as the best in informing the doctor students.
Online education has been considered the best educational technology since it has vast information that the learners can access in order get the required knowledge (Zieliński, 2007). According to Christensen, online learning links the students from various destinations with the best teachers in the subjects that they would wish to study. He considers online learning as a disruptive teaching technology. According to Christensen, he advises that Learners and teachers should move beyond today’s time-based rules, policies and regulations, which considers time as a constant and learning as a variable (Christensen, 1997). This inhibits the students, teachers and institutions to move to a competency-based learning system.
Healthcare students should ensure that they rise with the rise in online education. This rise will lead to a future whereby learning will be student-paced culture, which is opposed to the current forms of custodial education that are teacher-based.
Tele learning refers to instances where learning and teaching are supported by technologies. This could include distance learning, e-learning, e-learning, technology-based learning, and ICT-based learning. Tele learning can support this form of education since the students can access educational programs from different destinations. According to Christensen, the idea of learning in classrooms alone does not fully empower the learners with adequate information. Through Tele learning, the learners achieve this goal through accessing different learning programs from different teachers. For instance, students from one learning institution could access the lectures from other teachers from different institutions.
One of the technologies that can be used by the student doctors is the online libraries. Through these libraries, students can register according to the requirements of the specific library and access online and print materials from the comfort of their homes. Additionally, students could also attend online lectures from different teachers in order to get access to information. Online lectures can be streamed through Skype, which is a modern technology in education. These technologies can also apply to students of other disciplines since all information is available on the internet. As earlier mentioned in this paper, these technologies are student-paced and not teacher based, thereby offering the students the educational programs when they need them and not when the teachers can provide them.
References:
Christensen C., Grossman H. J., & Hwang J., (2008). The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care. New York City, U.S.: McGraw Hill Professional Publishing.
Zieliński K., (2007). Information Technology Solutions for Healthcare Health informatics, ISSN 1431-1917. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Science & Business Media Publishing.
Christensen C. (1997). The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail: Management of innovation and change series. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press
