Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Right now, you are equating low cost with untrained labor. It doesn’t have to be so because there is such pressure on jobs. Over the next 30 years, the level of pressure on jobs is going to be tremendous. The level of unemployment is going to go through the roof because of automation. You have all these excess people who can be trained to provide trained care at low cost. That’s probably going to be one of the trends of American society.

John Damgaard: Supply and demand works. You have an available labor pool. It will be put to work. It still doesn’t solve the fact that if you look at the demographic imbalance and the number of young people versus the population of the elderly, we are a rapidly maturing society. Even if they had nothing else to do, there’s not enough of them to provide the care, given the logistical challenges. Trained or untrained, all of that doesn’t matter. There’s not enough labor to go around.

Sramana Mitra: Are you sure about that? I have a hard time believing that.

John Damgaard: We have 300 or so million people. 110 million of them are going to be over 65 in the next 15 years.

Sramana Mitra: But we are also in a different phase of healthcare. 65-year-olds don’t need in-home care. People need that kind of care much later in life these days because of the advances in medical science. There is this huge population of people who are out of jobs. I haven’t done the exact number on this but it seems to me those two trends can, to some extent, balance each other.

John Damgaard: To some extent; not completely.

Sramana Mitra: That is where technology has a role to play by taking untrained people and equipping them with technology, and managing both the logistical side and at least some basic healthcare that is needed. That’s where technology can play a very big role.

John Damgaard: No doubt about it. For example, let’s look at the trained caregiver. One of the additional challenges is we don’t have enough nurses. The supply of nurses is yet to begin to  grow. We have the compounding effect that a good portion of the experienced nurses will be retiring and leaving the labor force just as the senior population begins to explode.

When you talk about equipping them with technology, how do you take the wisdom of a 55-year-old nurse who’s been around the block and make a 25-year-old make the same wise, instinctual decisions. You have two choices. You can let them practice for 30 years which is what we do today, or equip them with technology that coaches them towards a standard of care for a given situation. All of the big names in healthcare invest in that. That’s a difficult place for an entrepreneur to enter because there’s a very large capital requirement.

You have to have a platform upon which to deliver that content and those decisions. I think they’re complementary opportunities for people to create specialized clinical decision support and ruleset. Those are highly specialized opportunities that are very intensive both in subject matter expertise and capital. The context of the conversation is how you can get to a million dollars with those challenges. Occasionally, there are clever disruptive things there.

When I think about tools to enable clinical leverage, how do you take the nurse and give them five times more people to care for when they’re only 26 years old? Technology like clinical decision support is a big part of that.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare
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