I got religion.

At least religion that part of the savior to today’s, and more importantly, tomorrow’s healthcare crisis lies on the Internet.

With the abysmal adoption of IT to date within the healthcare sector, I am a strong believer that this industry will simply leap-frog the traditional, three-tiered IT architectural model and move directly to an SaaS-type model (ala athenahealth or Salesforce.com) coupled with cloud computing.  Granted, this will not occur over night and most large hospitals and IDNs will be loathed to give up on their server farms and internally developed apps, but there is a very large percentage of care (some estimate it at 80%) which takes place outside these large healthcare facilities, and it is here where adoption of healthcare IT (HIT) is lowest and where we will see the Interent play the biggest role.

We are still very early in the game here and there are numerous issues to contend with from privacy and security to uptime, to control – not insurmountable, but issues that must be addressed nonetheless.  So to get up to speed on how some of these issues may be tackled, I’m of to Harvard University for the next couple of days to get some schooling on the topic.  The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is having a 10th anniversary conference and have put together a very interesting agenda.  Will report back any insights I garner.