After flying all night from Hawaii, I arrived in Wichita this morning in time to give a presentation to the Kansas Hospital Association on the future of rural health care. Of the many trends I discussed, I strongly encouraged the members to consider how the emerging field of robotics will impact their industry. The reason I emphasized this trend is because the demographics of rural areas skew heavily toward the elderly.
With this in mind, I’d like to share this article from CNN about how the use of robotics is surging in Japan as a function of needing to address the needs of that country’s rapidly aging population.
Rural areas are already short of doctors, nurses and other skilled workers and they are likely to continue to face considerable pressure to “do more with less.” Therefore—just as in Japan—it is almost inevitable that robotics will come to play a greater role in both staffing and cleaning rural hospitals as well as taking care of many of the elderly patients in the years ahead.
To borrow a phrase from the Rolling Stone’s, in the future your elderly mother’s little helper might not be a pharmaceutical product—it could very well be a robot.
