Speech Technology 
Speech recognition offers efficiencies today but recent innovations and new technologies will expand the horizon of opportunity with speech technologies that will change the human computer interface, simplifying the interaction and offering new and innovative tools that increase efficiency and safety of healthcare delivery and reduce the administrative burden and decrease costs.
Medical Intelligence in the Cloud 
We’re facing a tsunami of patient data. The ability to process and leverage this data at the point of care is gone. Cloud based intelligence, analyzing data content and delivering contextually relevant information in real-time will become essential.
Continuous Mobile Monitoring 
Our current perspective of a patient’s healthcare record is comprised of snippets of our total healthcare record (imagine a piece of string as the record – all we get is a very short piece when we visit a doctor/facility). Continuous monitoring (wireless, cloud based and automatically monitored and tracked) changes this and offers more complete view of our health record and more important data that is not just single data points but trends and changes.
Personal Health Management 
This is becoming essential as we move from a system that disconnects the purchaser from the payer. It’s as if we were buying a car but someone else was paying with no personal financial consequence – we would all buy Ferrari’s, Porsche etc. As we move away from this model, personal responsibility, personal health management tools and PHR’s will become essential, not just for capturing and holding the data, but for helping people interpret and manage their own care. We will all become our own care coordinators for ourselves and our extended family, but will need the tools and solutions to help – these will come in form of PHP and health management tools.
Social Media in Healthcare 
If World of Warcraft can engage a generation of young adults and teens to stay online, engaged and spending enormous sums of money, the gaming industry is doing something “right”. Applying this to health and getting folks engaged is the next frontier. We have already seen that just giving a patient access to their medical record and putting a definitive Diagnosis of obesity has a positive impact on their behavior and general health. Imagine what else you could do with social media and gaming engagement.
But as always – don’t forget the patient. As I have noted before Doctor Please Look at Me not Your EMR
This was amplified in a recent article in JAMA: A Piece Of My Mind (JAMA. 2012;307(23):2497-2498. doi:10.1001/jama.2012.4946) that included this drawing from a 7year old girl:
