We see this occuring in health care for the past 20 years, some of it driven by technology innovations, but much of it from outside bureaucracy in it’s mis-directed attempts to control cost escalation. Managed care has been a misnomer for managed costs, and control of health care by non medical personell (ie, physicians). Physicians have been wrongly held accountable for ordering too many tests, too many treatments,while paradigm shifts occured without benefit of careful evaluation by physicians of their net effect, other than to reduce reimbursements, decrease access,, increase administrative paperwork and overhead.

Health information technology is the next “Pandora’s Box” currently being promulgated by political leaders, insurance companies and the massive bureaucracy now surrounding your visit to the provider’s office (used to be called..doctor’s office)….Patient’s are now called “consumers”.

Most physicians remain highly skeptical of Health IT.
Most younger providers look forward to adapting it to their practices, because they have grown up in a school system that now promotes IT for everything, examinations, applications, research, The word processor has replaced script. Email and the web are replacing the telphone call to make an appointment at the office. Economics and time factors are credited with this new shift.

My blog http://www.healthtrain.blogspot.com elaborates on these driving forces.

Economic change is driven by these evolutionary and revolutionary sea-changes..