Many IT industry pundits you speak to these days will call out healthcare IT as one of the up and coming hot areas in the software business. However, what does up and coming really mean? There have been plenty of flame outs and problems of health IT projects in the news too.
I am very optimistic about this space, not the least because the Obama administration is putting a good amount of money in this space, but also because the US healthcare system really needs to take advantage of the advancements in computing technology to reduce costs, improve their processes and get out under the thumbs of traditional heavily customized (i.e. expensive) software vendors .
An idea proposed by Boris Evelson of Forrester Research is very close to my heart. He wrote Healthcare Tech: Can BI Help Save The System? My experience with traditional enterprise software indicates that people often focused solely on the transactional aspects of the system. If built with older client server technology (or even with a web client), the software often ends up being hard to use, not scalable and a major pain to configure for business specific needs.
People building, evaluating and buying healthcare IT applications should think about
- What salesforce.com has done to the CRM industry – You do not have to buy that behemoth product that promises every feature that you can imagine from the get-go, pay a pound of your flesh for the license and 2 more pounds of implementation consulting dollars, find the hardware in your data center to run it and then deal with the endless upgrade and maintenance headache. Your vendor should be able to run the software for you securely, deal with the maintenance issues and ultimately provide a software that can be configured to your needs instead of requiring expensive customization.
- What Business Intelligence has done to ERP and CRM – As the ERP and CRM implementations mature, people realize that what is important to the business is not just about implementing the good old software and run the transactions through it. Ultimately you want visibility into your data with the help of business intelligence. Your system needs to helps you make better care or process decisions. The software needs to be able to pull together data from other systems as well, and easily (not requiring a data modeling expert every step).
- What Blackberry did to Email – People want access to their data. If your application does not allow them to work on their iPhone, Blackberry or other smartphones, someone else will build a software that can. To win, the application really needs to be robust, easy to use and most importantly fit into the existing medical office workflow. Some enterprise software vendor venturing into this space may think they can transform the business process like they did with ERP years ago. However, with the prevalence of Social Media, your users have got used to the software working for them, instead of the other way around. Get used to it.
That said, journalists and skeptics have raised some valid points that we cannot brush aside. See this article on BusinessWeek recently The Dubious Promise of Digital Medicine. There was a time when lots of people thought buying stuff over the internet using a credit card was extremely dangerous to your financial health. Digital medicine needs to move beyond the isolated desktop application age into the high available, secure and easy-to-use SaaS age. It will be a little while before we get there but we will.