Medicity Senior Vice President Robert Connely recently took out his crystal ball and made some interesting predictions about the future of health information technology and how health care will be delivered.

Over the years, Robert’s vision of the future has led to a number of pioneering innovations including introducing the use of intelligent software agents to meet the challenges of health information exchange between hospitals, physicians, and other stakeholders in the health care community.

At a recent Medicity webinar entitled “Disrupt or Take a Seat: Here’s the Future of Health IT,” Robert focused on key disruptive technologies that are coming down the pike.

Disruptive technology is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe patterns in which unexpected innovations suddenly displace current products or services, thus disrupting the existing market.

Examples of this include YouTube and social media displacing traditional media (newspapers, TV); no-frills Southwest Airlines disrupting the airline industry; Netflix disrupting Blockbuster; Amazon displacing independent brick and mortar bookstores.

According to Christensen, “An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.”

Stay tuned for next week’s blog, which will overview Robert’s predictions about disruptive health care technologies.