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.