2013 Health IT Predictions – 3-D Printing in Healthcare

I never can resist clicking on a tweet that looks at the future landscape of healthcare IT. I love to see what other people are saying about it. Although, as is the case above, I usually find that people are pretty cautious in their predictions. The challenge is that a year is probably not a big enough time frame to really make bold predictions.

For example, the above article suggests the following as major healthcare IT trends: patient portals, mobile devices, and telemedicine. They are absolutely right. Does anyone doubt that all of these things won’t be major happenings in 2013? We know they will because they’ve already started happening today. Next year will just be an extension of this year.

On the other hand, I was intrigued by this tweet about 3-D Printing in healthcare:

If you don’t know about 3-D printing, then check it out on Wikipedia. It is an absolutely incredible technology that’s going to absolutely revolutionize manufacturing products as we know it. That includes many of the products we use in healthcare. Is it going to happen next year? I don’t think so. Certainly much progress will be made in 2013, but 5 years from now 3D printing is going to be able to do insane things when it comes to creating your own products with a simple 3D printer.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What drastic things do you think will happen in healthcare 5 years from now? Feel free to look even farther out if you prefer.

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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