Healthcare Technology and Individualized Health – Let the separate orbits unite
Effective healthcare IT organizations cannot focus exclusively on technology alone.
As HIT platforms mature and innovate the organizational needs to effectively manage these systems and their integrations increases as well. After all, unless these systems inter-relate and are properly managed we will stay in 12th place in the world in terms of healthcare quality.
How many organizations recognize this?
We have hospitals full of million dollar plus robots, 10 different proprietary non-integrated platforms that cost tens of millions of dollars —with little if any cross collaboration and interactive functionality. These institutions have hundreds of disconnected health care professionals coming in and out of their doors daily. Worse yet. Those hundreds of doctors, are not actively connected to the thousands of patients who are coming through their system… and the patients’ data stream either doesn’t exist, is siloed in a proprietary platform on a providers server, and is most certainly not being monitored in a coordinated effective manner —
Until the multitude of IT services are effectively managed and interwoven we will never realize the dream of fixing our broken healthcare system… and we will certainly not realize our ultimate focus. Patient centered care, founded on sound population based evidence.
Individualized health is still a distant focus of many players. It needs to move to the forefront. It requires not only technology but layering on the appropriate managerial and organizational infrastructure to insure its proper function
We have archaic, proprietary, siloed and tethered healthcare data management systems where data is utilized primarily to justify billing … not to assist current or future patients.
The medical community has been in a separate orbit from the rapid advances materializing in the digital world…. The medical community has been in a separate orbit from the social graph. This has to change. The opportunity cost of not doing so, is very high.
Why isn’t technology run like another clinical department? Doctors, nurses, techs, PA’s, orders, scheduling, documentation, block time for projects, billing based on documentation, etc? Orders are made by professionals that have undergone years of training to where they can make a decision without having 5 meetings with committees that have no expertise into the decision they are being asked to make? In my view, the clinical field is so much more efficient. Do your service desk numbers stack up to your ED triage numbers? Do your surgeons perform more ‘projects’ per day than your IT analysts? Are surgeries less complex or complicated than IT projects?