What makes Healthcare different?
Aug 10, 2011Tom Beale has picked up on a thread about what makes healthcare different (and kindly cited my earlier post on the subject). I’m going to pick up on something Tom says, because it’s very much in my mind at the moment:
why can’t the health sector get its act together with ICT?
The implication here is that some other sectors have. Apparently.
Well, I’d like to know what ones have? When I look at the other industries, I see a pattern:
- Businesses develop new services (sometimes based on new technologies)
- As the use of the service coalesces, the variability of the service becomes a tax, not a benefit
- A bunch of industry big wigs decide to make it a commodity instead (sometimes external prompt from government is needed)
- They create a consortium, gather a bunch of engineers, come up with a partially/mostly bespoke solution, and call it a standard
- Then they pass it over to the operational guys who run it to the ground with adoption and conformance etc
A bunch of piecemeal standards. What is healthcare supposed to learn from this?
As far as I can tell, from reading ITU standards, ITU imposes common process, but is much less interested in imposing common framework, the way that HL7 does it (and IHE). So maybe what we are supposed to learn is that these integrated standards are a waste of time? Bespoke is the way to go?
Yet it’s exactly these integrated approaches that can build the future everyone imagines… and what other industry has built anything at all like a national EHR?
As far as I can tell, healthcare automated and integrated the simple stuff decades ago (in fact, the standard for this are really showing their age now). And the things we’re trying to standardise now are still basic research in other industries (actually, they are in healthcare too, which is part of why it’s so hard to standardise them)
Am I wrong? I’ll be happy to be informed of good integrated standards, or anything at all like an EHR in another sector, in the comments…