Ask Rahul Gandhi: How a Good Idea Can Be Screwed by Dumb Communication (2 Lessons included)

Rahul Gandhi again talks about his vision.

“When I see MRI machines not connected, I see huge problem. Connecting all of those MRI machines will completely transform the planet”

This becomes a butt of a joke. And this is not the first time. While one may not respect Rahul Gandhi much for original thoughts, I suspect there are some advisers who may be more exposed to the world. Hence I did a quick search and found this.

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/05/hospitals-internet-of-things-patient-care.html

It talks about how a device down time could be improved through

• Device diagnostics  – Checking whether the machine is functioning properly. Fix it before it breaks down. At least fix immediately after it stops functioning.
• Measuring utilization – How to decide whether hospital needs to buy more machines? It should be after concluding that utilization of existing machines reached almost 100  percent.

Given the cost of MRI machines, the healthcare involving MRI scan is already expensive. If the hospital buys more machines while there are unused machines, who will eventually pay for it?

It is the patient.

What if the machine malfunctions and patient does not know? Doctor, upon inspection and doubt, will prescribe another scan. Who will pay?

The patient.

It is essentially about the benefits of Internet of Things.

What went wrong in the video?

1. Audience can make out if you thought through the idea or not. When you are borrowing ideas and communicating without thinking through, this could happen.
2. I am aware of too many IoT ideas failing because, the benefits do not come clearly. They get communicated more as school science projects than something that will have clear benefits.

How the procurement costs at hospital get cascaded to patient care cost, how IoT could help in reducing the scanning machines cost and a figure of how much it could reduce the individual patient care cost would have connected lot more with audience.

When we pitched for energy management through analytics, the jargon of IoT was not popular (about 7 years back). Also we did not have experts in energy usage in campuses. One expert we had was too much into operations in the past, who could not think about the possibilities. The rest of us who could think, did not take enough pain in knowing the domain and bringing about the specific benefits.

It required lot of deep study on benefits of analytics to talk about the idea.

Without knowing enough of what we are talking about, what would happen? Ask Rahul Gandhi.