He recalled one Saturday where he cared for "about 80 percent of patients on the phone, and I realized that I'd 'seen' more people in those four hours than I usually see in a [normal] week. I had taken approximately 30 to 60 seconds for each visit. The price point was cheap; in fact, it was free. For the patients it was extremely convenient and timely medicine."

The aim, he said, should be to take a cue from what's spurred the semiconductor industry: double the patients a doctor treats, "and cut the cost of treating them by 50 percent."

Alice Borrelli, director of global healthcare policy at Intel, has a similar vision  -  on an even faster scale. "We need to think about applying Moore's Law to healthcare where we double the access to patients while cutting the costs in half  -  maybe not in the 24 months that technology moves, but at a much more accelerated pace than today's practices," she wrote in a recent blog post.

In the meantime, the challenge of getting the most of out of health IT continues. In 2002  -  eons, seemingly, before HITECH and meaningful use put a match to the health IT fuse  -  Harvard Medical School researchers Kirby Vosburgh and Ronald Newbower wrote a study titled "Moore's Law, Disruptive Technologies, and the Clinician."

"The advancement of technical power described by Moore's Law offers great potential for enabling more cost-effective medical devices and systems," they wrote. "However, progress has been slow."

Among the reasons for this lag, they suggested skills and workforce shortages, marketplace barriers, physician-resistance, perverse incentives (or, as they put it, the "anti-rational economic structure of healthcare") and regulatory hurdles.

One of the chief barriers cited had to do with technology itself  -  especially with regard to interoperability. "New technologies must work easily with disparate systems, standards and islands of automation," wrote Vosburgh and Newbower.

Thankfully, especially since HITECH and the Affordable Care Act, those challenges are all being conscientiously targeted, with varying levels of success so far. (Interoperability remains elusive.)

One big technology development since that article was published emerged in the mid-aughts, and has been steadily increasing in power and decreasing in price since: the smartphone.

Vosburgh and Newbower wrote that "disruptive technologies"  -  which they define as "those that are established in one market, but then penetrate and overwhelm another market"  -  could sidestep those pitfalls on the road toward healthcare's doubled and redoubled improvement.

Omnipresent pocket computers, consumer devices that have been embraced in the clinical setting faster than perhaps any other technology, would seem fit to earn the "disruptive" label.