What makes healthcare special?
Jun 26, 2011An insightful and blunt take-down of Google from Mr HISTalk:
Google predictably did what its know-it-all technology company predecessors have done over the years: dipped an arrogant and half-assed toe into the health IT waters; roused a loud rabble of shrieking fanboy bloggers and reporters (many of them as light on healthcare IT experience as Google) who instantly declared it to be the Second Coming that would make all decades-old boring vendors instantly obsolete or subservient to the Googleplex; and then turned tailed and slunk off at the first sign of lackluster ROI, leaving the few patients and providers who actually cared high and dry except for those same old boring vendors who have stuck it out for decades instead of chasing whatever sector looked juicy at the moment.
I skeptical that Microsoft will last it out too. Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to start ringing in the changes to respond to the ongoing success from Apple and Google at sucking the profit out of their mainstream business. How can they continue to justify spending money on stuff like HealthVault then?
It’s not just vendors, btw, who act like this. Again and again I’ve met “experts” who’ve come out of banking or telecommunications, looked at healthcare, and said “You guys have no idea what you’re doing. We’ll just solve your problems like we did in [x]”. Give them 9 months, and they’ll be gone, because while I’m never sure whether we know what we’re doing, I’m sure that they **don’t know what **we’re doing when I hear something like that.
Healthcare long ago integrated the stuff that is easy. So long ago that the two mainstream standards - HL7 v2 and DICOM - are seriously showing their age. But they’ve also go incredible momentum too. What we’re trying to do now is hard - both technically and socially.