One of the top IT publications is Information Week, and Chilmark Research is feeling pretty good right now as we are on the homepage of both the main site, as well as their newly launched healthcare vertical site. Believe we will hold these positions until sometime on Monday.
Information Week is a pub that I’ve had a lot of respect for over the years for the quality of their reporting. As many of you know, in my past life I was an IT analyst over in the manufacturing sector, leading the Enterprise Software Team for ARC Advisory Group. While at ARC I attended many a software vendor user conference (Dassault Systemes, EDS, IBM, i2, Oracle, SAP, etc.). It was at these events that I got to know many an IW reporter. They were always good, always had good questions to ask and I’m quite pleased to see that they have begun to cover the healthcare IT sector. Applying their level of expertise and knowledge to this sector is a good thing as there is much healthcare can learn from IT adoption best practices in other industries – if healthcare stakeholders will listen.
So healthcare sector, you may think you are so different from any other industry and that all your challenges are unique but take it from me, one who has been drinking from the proverbial firehouse to get up to speed on HIT issues over the last two years and spent 15 years in manaufacturing IT: Many of the challenges you face in the successful adoption of IT are not all that different than other industries. Please take the blinders off and look beyond the confines of healthcare as there is much to learn from the experiences of others and Information Week is there to help.
I agree completely that the healthcare industry needs to lose its “not invented here” (NIH) predisposition. From an IT perspective it is about as closed an industry as I have come across in twenty plus years of observing various sectors’ consumption of IT.
Why? For the very reason that this post suggests, the healthcare industry believes (in general) that its problems are so different and so unique that only someone with a healthcare background and HIT can add value.
This is an extremely myopic and silly notion. As the fun starts with a real move to EHRs the industry is going to need plenty of help. This help will need to come in many forms, including the use of agile methodologies instead the old waterfall methods that are almost guaranteed to fail when attempting to solve a problem with this much complexity.