I’ve been reading a fascinating book by a brilliant author. Walter Isaacson’s 2014 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, followed upon his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, and provides a compelling look at the people who helped create and develop the foundational technologies of our contemporary era, including modern computing and computer technology, the microchip, the transistor, and the Internet.
In chapter 7, on the Internet, Isaacson writes, “In searching for fathers of the Internet, the best person to start with is a laconic yet oddly charming psychologist and technologist, with an open-faced grin and show-me attitude, named Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, born in 1915 and known to everyone as ‘Lick.’ He pioneered the two most important concepts underlying the Internet: decentralized networks that would enable the distribution of information to and from anywhere, and interfaces that would facilitate human-machine interaction in real time. Plus, he was the founding director of the military office that funded the ARPANET, and he returned for a stint a decade later when protocols were created to weave it into what became the Internet. Said one of his partners and protégés, Bob Taylor, ‘He was really the father of it all.’” And of course, ARPA/DARPA ended up creating the foundation for today’s World Wide Web.
And in one of the most influential papers written in the history of postwar technology, titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” published in 1960, Licklider had written, “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approved by the information-handling machines we know today.” That statement predicted everything that was to come in the following decades. It is individuals like Licklider who have helped to change how things are done in the world; they have been the fathers and mothers of innovation.
And it is in a healthcare industry in which innovation and transformation are becoming fundamental watchwords going forward, that we are excited to unveil with this issue of our publication our new name and identity, Healthcare Innovation. Healthcare Innovation represents the merger of two esteemed publications, Healthcare Informatics and Health Management Technology, and of our respected event series, the Health IT Summits from Healthcare Informatics. We, the editors of Healthcare Innovation, will be continuing forward and amplifying content, as we reach more widely to capture members of the healthcare senior executive audience who are in the trenches innovating in the U.S. healthcare industry, and transforming it, right now.
Our award-winning editors and programming directors are excited to share our new name and brand identity with all of you, our readers and audience members. As we move forward, you will see expanded editorial and programming content, commensurate with our new brand identity, and inclusive of all the healthcare IT, clinician, and administrative leaders in hospitals, medical groups, integrated health networks, ACOs, clinically integrated networks, HIEs, and beyond.
We look forward to continuing forward with you on this exciting journey, as the leaders of the U.S. healthcare system work to transform the industry and help facilitate the important shift from volume to value. This is a journey whose horizon is as exciting as any in the history of healthcare; and it invites the participation of all those who can contribute to its advancement. Just like Joseph Licklider and the innovators who created the Internet and launched an Information Age revolution, our readers and audience members are in the process of changing healthcare. Nothing more exciting could be imagined. We welcome you to continue sharing the journey with us. We really all are in this together.
--The Editors of Healthcare Innovation
