As a recruiter, I am in a unique position in that I have learned about Healthcare IT through the eyes of vendors in the industry as opposed to direct interaction with the provider community. My clients are technology and service companies that sell some sort of automation to the Provider and Payer markets. Their charter is to streamline clinical and financial workflows and make healthcare cheaper to perform and more efficient resulting in improved outcomes.
Every day I hear that Healthcare is light-years behind other industries in the use and adoption of technology. However, I have concluded, as many have in this industry, that throwing technology and money at the problem doesn’t always work. Healthcare is in the midst of a monumental paradigm shift from “pay for service” to “pay for performance.” As a result, the business challenges are continuing to change on a daily basis. Also, keep in mind that clinicians are a unique breed, and they don’t think and operate like those in the broader business community. Mix those two elements together and you have one, enormous moving target. Healthcare can achieve the transformation it is looking for, but it is going to require a more cyclical diet of technology, policy change and consulting aimed at optimization of the purchased technology. This optimization will come in the form of better user adoption, smoothing out clinical workflow and process, normalization of data (so that BI & Analytics tools work properly) and major coaching around how to make better decisions through the use of the “actionable data” that all of this technology produces.
If we can achieve the proper “balanced diet” of all of the above, I am confident that HIT will change healthcare in a very valuable and meaningful way. I am consistently amazed by the ingenuity, creativity and foresight of the folks in our business and I think that the average patient/healthcare consumer in this country will enjoy a more positive experience, better health and eventually it won’t be quite as painful on the pocketbook.
In conclusion, I think the way to really change healthcare is to bite off manageable chunks of technology and make sure it gets digested and adopted by the end user. Only then will we see true value in the form of improved outcomes and reduced cost.
