Everyone’s looking for the Uber of healthcare. The ideal is a button that makes everything right.

Most aspiring health care Ubers amount to a convenience for the worried well positioned as brilliant disruption.

Attention and social dialog surrounding such ‘innovations’ are fueled almost exclusively by fantasy. Sensational solutions are less about real problems and more about what can be grown and sold.

But the needs of the sick can’t be met with a button. Responsibility for the chronically ill is nothing like taking people for a ride.

I wonder what the Uber doctors will do when called with an icteric 7-month-old baby with biliary atresia post-Kasai with end stage liver disease and fever.

(The entrepreneur fidgets with his Moleskine and looks awkwardly about) “But that’s really not our…demographic.” 

My point exactly.

People are messy. Sick people are messier. And there is no button.

You should really read Jay Parkinson’ reality check on house calls over at KevinMD. He unpacks some of the assumptions driving the phenomenon of one button medicine.

Image via Erkko/Flickr