Learning around the patient is the only incentive and learning can hopefully augment better care.
Question is are we ready to develop a learning ecosystem that just requires a minimal investment by each healthcare stakeholder be it nurse, student, resident, consultant (an internet connection and device) to learn around our patients?
My hunch is that possibly a few more years down the line when smart phones and their connectivity become more ubiquitous, we may have it made. You will notice that i am not paying much attention to the IT infrastructure necessary to sustain this. Current freely available cloud based platforms could suffice?
Also would the near future really see a sea change in our learning mindset from that of a population based approach celebrating average outcomes to an individualized/personalized approach where every patient is a separate project to be solved with if necessary new solutions that can be tailor made and developed toward that patient (for a fee in which case the patient funds this research for his own and similar patients' benefits) rather than the current approach toward first developing a mass market for any solution that is innovated (http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
for most of us 'learning' can happen only after we have taken care of our 'earning' requirements and 'earning' shall remain a more viable 'carrot' for a long time. :-)
However for some who are out of this 'earning' cycle and have temporarily met its worldly requirements (or at best somehow managed to forget about earning altogether), learning can be a very delicious, enticing and addictive carrot.:-)
We often do not like learning for exams or some other set deadlines but that/those may not be what 'real-learning' is all about? Real learning could be something that we pursue to gain a pure kind of joy (call it hedonistic pleasure if you will)? :-)
Perhaps most of our health-IT/HIS/EMR infrastructure has developed and exists only to facilitate learning around our patients as a 'collaborative team' (be it a team of nurses, physicians, physiotherapists or even patient relatives)?
Enabling diffusion of this collaborative-team approach to health-IT may require a major commitment by clinicians and a willingness to take risks (such as getting addicted to learning and forgetting about earning-big for some time)? :-) Paying attention to the notion of a critical mass of adopters is essential to developing implementation strategies that will accelerate the adoption process by clinicians. http://www.biomedcentral.com/