The Next Generation Tech Kids

Today I had the amazing opportunity to volunteer at my kids school. They make it a big deal for dad’s to volunteer at the school and my kids absolutely adore having their dad at school with them. We have a tradition that I go and spend the day at school with my kids on their birthdays. It’s pretty awesome and I might have even shed a tear or two. (Side Note: Check out my new Daddy Blog for cute pics of my kids)

However, that’s not the point of this post. It turns out today was testing day for a bunch of my kids (I have 3 in elementary school). What was amazing is that all of the test were administered on a computer. Yes, even my 5 year old kindergartner was taking his test on the computer. In fact the teacher told me, “It’s kind of hard because they don’t even really know how to type.”

Whether this is a good idea or not, is a topic for an education blog. However, I’ve written before about the next generation of digital natives and the impact they’ll have on healthcare and EHR. If we look a little further out, my 5 year old won’t even be able to comprehend the idea of a paper chart. It will be so ridiculous to him.

I’m still processing what this will mean to healthcare IT and to society in general. As I think back on the thousands of blog posts I’ve written about adopting EHR, I can think of many that will sound ridiculous even 5-10 years from now. That has me very excited. Not that my content is no longer useful (unless you enjoy Health IT history). I’m excited that a whole sea change is going to happen in how we want technology applied to healthcare.

No doubt, it’s not without some risk. I’ve heard many argue that the next generation doesn’t care about privacy. Personally I’ve seen quite the opposite. The next generation has a very sophisticated approach to privacy. They know when and where to share something based on who and what they want to see it. It’s the older generation that has a problem knowing exactly where something should be shared and where it shouldn’t. That’s not to say that some young kids don’t make mistakes. They do, but most are quite aware of where something is being shared. It’s why so many kids use snapchat.

What do you think of the coming generations of technology savvy people? What benefits will they bring? What challenges will we face? Are you excited, scared, nervous?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • Crazy as this may sound, but a good doctor is a not a good techie. You could be a master at using a computer but being a great physician requires a completely different skill set. Much to the dismay of ONC, CMS, and all the EHR vendors, data entry and IT savviness is not in the wheelhouse of most physicians. And comfort with computers does not make a great health provider. At some point in the not to distant future, the leaders of this health IT push will realize that physicians and nurses and other EPs are terrible at data entry and all this great white hope for EHR nirvana will finally be tempered. It currently is and remain bad data in equals bad data out as long as data entry is piled on to the caregivers. Sorry, but the next great physician or nurse is not coming from your best student in the high school computer class.

  • Completely agree that practicing medicine and being tech savvy are two different skill sets. The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to the maturing heath IT we know today eary on which will make them much more comfortable building on this skill set through their careers.

    What major challenge many of us health IT folks see is what happens when the systems we rely on so heavily have a period of downtime. These younger generations of clinicians are becoming far less familiar with the clinical procedures that need to be followed when the system is unavailable.

  • I think the next generation of kids will all be tech savvy. So, the best doctor might not be from the computer science class (although, one of the best doctors I know from my high school computer science class is an amazing doctor in NY, but I digress), but it won’t matter. They’ll all be digitally sound.

    Your point about doctors being data entry clerks does need to change. This or the next generation doctor doesn’t want to be a data entry clerk. I think this will evolve so they don’t have to be.

    Mac, it’s a good point when it comes to relying too much on technology. There’s certainly a balance between knowing how to treat a patient and relying on technology so you know how to treat a patient.

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