Zero Marginal Cost and Healthcare

I stumbled upon an old post from the always insightful and interesting 3G Doctor blog about the concept of ‘Zero Marginal Cost.’ Here’s a great quote they use in the post from Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures:

“Why is everyone going online? It turns out there’s a simple answer to that: Kittens. Everyone wants to see Kittens. Well there’s actually something more to this, there’s something serious to this because when I downloaded this image from Flickr there was no noticeable cost to anybody. The marginal cost of creating a copy in the digital world is zero and that is driving all the changes that we’re seeing… …and we’re just at the beginning of this change”

I love the concept of zero (or at least near zero) marginal costs. It’s the premise of so many of the amazing things we experience on the internet. What’s troubling is that healthcare hasn’t embraced the idea of zero marginal costs. At least not in the way that it could.

In healthcare, we still like to talk about how much it’s going to cost a patient to get access to their medical records. There are literally state laws which say how much you can charge. Just writing this after writing about the marginal costs of delivering something electronically makes the concept sound silly. Imagine if your bank charged you per sheet to print out your statements each month. That’s basically what we’re asked to do in healthcare.

We’ve started to see some change in this, but there’s still resistance. There’s a real, palpable feel by many in healthcare that giving free access to all of your patient info could lead to really ugly problems. While there might be a few outlier cases people could identify, I’d argue the opposite. Think about the really ugly problems that occur in healthcare because patients don’t have their health information.

It’s time for healthcare to put down their excuses and embrace the benefits that zero marginal costs of sharing health information can provide. I’m not saying we should do it recklessly. We should be thoughtful in how we do it, but we should do it. It’s no longer a technical or security challenge, it’s just a cultural challenge.

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.

   

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