The California HealthCare Foundation’s Chronic Disease Care conference was an opportunity to hear on-the-ground testimony about how health care is evolving.

The best take-away for me was Hunter Gatewood’s adoption curve illustration which is the visual for his wonderful observation that early adopters are like “happy dogs in a pile of sticks. Late adopters are more like a hesitant cat, waiting to see what works, what blows up in dogs’ faces.” Who hasn’t been there?

I am not a hospital administrator so you might think this conference’s lessons weren’t for me. But I spend quite a bit of time thinking about technology adoption and how systems are transformed, either from the top (banks’ creation of online services transformed the consumer side of that industry) or from the bottom (peer-to-peer transformed the music industry).

Read more at e-patients.net: Happy Dogs in a Pile of Sticks