Efficiency in the Health Care Industries A View From the Outside

摘要

To be sure, there are additional fundamental differences between the 2 industries. One industry deals with the well-defined world of silicon, the other with living human beings. Humans are incredibly complex biological systems, and working with them has to be subject to safety, legal, and ethical concerns. Nevertheless, it is helpful to mine this comparison for every measure of learning that can be found.First, there are important differences between health care and microchip industries in terms of research efficiency. This year marks the 40th anniversary of a construct widely known as Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors that can be practically included on a microchip doubles every year. This law has been a guiding metric of the rate of technology development.1 According to this metric, the microchip industry has reached a state in which microchips containing many millions of transistors are shipped to the worldwide electronics industry in quantities that are measured in the billions per month.