A few months back, Eric Dishman, chief healthcare strategist and director of health policy for the Intel-GE Care Innovations joint venture, spoke to me about how mobile and wireless healthcare technologies showed promise for what he called "virtual care coordination."

As Dishman explained, "In a world in which there's not going to be enough doctors and nurses and hospital beds to take care of an increasingly older and sicker population, Intel's really focused on how do we use disruptive technologies to enable care of people in the home and in the community."

This might not have been all that groundbreaking for his audience at the time, attendees at the Medical Group Management Association annual conference. However, it apparently was eye-opening information for a group of technology and development ministers from about 80 countries, including many from what many have euphemistically called "low-resource" parts of the world.

Dishman spoke in Palo Alto, Calif., earlier this month about how mobile and home-based technologies could help stretch limited funds and create "sustainable healthcare for all." He was there for a meeting called USRio+2.0, the official U.S. State Department event before Rio+20—officially known as the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development—this June in Rio de Janeiro, commemorating the 20th anniversary of a conference in the Brazilian city that effectively started the international movement toward sustainability.

Dishman challenged the notion that nations, regions and cities needed to build more hospitals to meet the needs of aging populations and address both the types of chronic ailments that plague Western countries and communicable diseases that poorer areas still struggle with. "The notion of a hospital as a symbol of 'having arrived'—of economic and technological progress—is not surprising, but also not very healthy in the long run," he said. "In the midst of Global Aging, a hospital-centric model must somehow begin to give way to a home-centric model for the future."

In other words, developing countries don't need to "copy the Western model," as Dishman later told me. A lot of places that never had landline telephones now are blanketed with cellular coverage. Dishman reported that he's heard about villages in Mozambique that don't have constant, reliable electricity but do have broadband Internet service thanks to WiMAX technology.

Broadband, of course, can support all kinds of nonacute healthcare services for a lot less money than it costs to put up a hospital or a modern outpatient clinic. "It's not clear that we need hospitals at all," Dishman said in an interview. "You've got to leverage those scarce resources very preciously."

This was an option that a lot of the ministers in attendance had not even considered. "It was just kind of a wake-up call," Dishman reported.

Oh, by the way, there is a business case for this approach, as well; Dishman estimates that there is about a $500 billion opportunity for health IT in developing markets, particularly via non-governmental organizations.

If undeveloped societies follow the example set by the West, they could end up with the same kind of inefficient, high-cost, error-prone infrastructure that we have here in America. Or they could try an entirely new approach, since they essentially have blank slates in so many ways.

That's a lesson we ought to heed in the United States. The old ways simply aren't working, and yet the medical establishment—without much pressure from the broader public—continues to follow broken processes.

(Watch this video of Dishman's presentation at USRio+2.0. Dishman takes the stage at about 20:45.)