The legal community and the medical community have a lot in common, it seems:
- Both manage cases
- Both face pricing pressures
- Both face compliance concerns
- Confidentiality is paramount
Technology promises the potential to redesign the business and rethink the practice in both professions. Yet instead of reimagining – as the rather stirring video embedded nearby suggests, what if we just…imagine?
What if medical technology…
…Allowed a doctor to know exactly what’s wrong with even the most challenging medical cases? For every ten people that walk into the emergency room, a doctor knows exactly what’s wrong with 80%. The doctor has practiced medicine for a long time and has seen the symptoms and indications before.
For 10% the doctor has got a good hypothesis, but needs to check the literature. A doctor may not know all the answers off the cuff, but a good one knows where to find them quickly. A diagnosis takes just a little longer than the previous 80% of patients.
The final 10% is a complete mystery. The doctor has no idea what’s wrong with them. The diagnosis requires a methodical approach. Tests, questions, data entry, synthesis, consultations are all part of a process to make a diagnosis.
What if that process was part of the patient intake process from the very beginning? What if as the questionnaires, the vital signs, and the other information were entered into the patient’s case management system – an algorithm ran in the background looking for correlations? It would narrow down the possibilities and suggest relevant medical literature for the doctor to review – and streamline the diagnosis.
What if legal technology…
…Applied the same concept? As a new matter was opened, technology would begin to sort and sift – not just through content and literature, but also through integrated system data like discovery, invoices and benchmarks. The result – by the time the matter was created – would be a suggested budget, a timeline, and relevant content for making a case.
Technologists might point out the complexity, lawyers perhaps the technicalities, and consultants may chime in with a dose of reality.
But…what if we didn’t rethink or redesigned or re-anything…but just imagined?
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