Goal:start a dialogue, taking a holistic view of the entirety of healthcare. This is just scratching the surface.
"What constitutes a great healthcare idea?"
Is it one that lowers overall costs, improves worker productivity or patient care? (I'll assume "yes" to all these but you may have a different opinion).
But, do great ideas even need to be big ones? What about a thermal sensor that notifies someone when humidity or temperature levels exceed a threshold? I.e. Something that few will see or know about, but could easily save millions of dollars worth of equipment if only it had been implemented?
Or how about a simple process that saves a few minutes of time when treating a patient. I.e. If a nurse could spend a few minutes engaged in positive dialogue with a patient, rather than fighting the EMR solution, wouldn't that be a great idea?
If a "great" idea were introduced that could improve healthcare in some measurable way, by several orders of magnitude, would it be great if no one supported it? I say "no", which is why my first suggestion is:
Achieve acceptance and buy-in from the clinical community before development or implementation of any
products and/or process changes
   * To explore the "How" of this topic would require more time and expertise than I currently have, but I'd enjoy debating the merits of this assertion
"All for one or one for all?"
Hospital networks are curious beasts and are buying up independent facilities left and right. Individual hospitals tend to exist as independent businesses, even when part of a larger organization. To further complicate things, each department within the hospital is treated like a business. (by "business" I'm referring to someone or some group taking on the responsibility of fiscal gains/losses). The model looks something like this:
[Big Parent] organization manages a cluster of geographically separated care organizations --> which manage one or more care facilities --> which manage specialty practices and general medicine. Whether this is a good or bad idea is beyond me, but the byproduct is complexity.
Picture several micro-businesses, operating in the same space, solving problems independently of each other. The [Big Parent] is trying to leverage buying power, homogenize applications, and standardize processes, but the challenge they face are the hundreds of micro-business stakeholders who need to make quick decisions and satisfy their immediate and short-term needs.
The medical software industry is a great example of capitalizing on localized, short-term needs (for the moment, I am omitting big EMR companies like Cerner, Eclipsys, and McKesson). There are literally hundreds of applications written for specialty groups that focus on one aspect of patient care. The advantage of specialized applications is that they can be developed quickly and with precision. Conversely, big EMR solutions tend to evolve at a glacial clip, which frustrates clinicians and administrators who want to progress their EMR to an idealized, digital state. The advantage of the big EMR guys is that they can enforce standards (to some degree), and consolidate data from multiple sources, leveraging enterprise technologies along the way.
I propose that big software solutions move too slow for many people, creating a resistance to adoption. I also propose that hundreds of unrelated applications serving individual specialists fail to leverage economies of scale and become inherently wasteful. This leads me to my second suggestion:
At the Global level - we need a SINGLE, OPEN standards organization for delivering healthcare applications
   * Current standards bodies: NIST(HCLS), HITSP, NAHIT, HIPAA, HITECH...and on and on...
   * Loosely analagous to the Joint Commission, which is dedicated to helping healthcare organizations deliver better patient care, this body would help healthcare application providers deliver better care by accrediting software in terms of adherence to standards.
         o One example of a standard might be that an application stores and retrieves patient data in a standard format as to be secure, yet consumable by other valid applications for , reuse, retrieval, reporting and business intelligence, etc...
               + Advantage: Simplify the technical storage and retrieval challenge, allowing multiple discreet departments to utilize enterprise-grade solutions (Equallogic?)
               + Advantage: Simplify and accelerate the software development process by leveraging existing and open standards
   * There are too many items to discuss here, but you get the picture and I'd be happy to debate this assertion as well
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As I descend from 100,000 feet to 50,000, what specific technologies should companies like Dell look at?
You've got a 4-billion dollar mass of humanity now that will need care and feeding, but they have good experience in health care, so continue developing businesses cases for:
Outsourcing IT
Let hospital administrators focus on patient care, rather than aging in-house data centers. Put servers and data in secured facilities designed to be redundant. Get your Data Centers prepped for healthcare - learn the rules and regs - chop chop.
Virtualization
Find the list of application vendors who are too small to keep up with the pace of hardware technology and partner with them, helping them certify their applications in virtual environments. Show the business case for making the most efficient use of every CPU cycle, Disk sector, Memory stick, Watt, and physical space in every rack
Wireless
The pain of implementing wireless in a hospital is staggering. Partner with a wireless company if you haven't already, Dell! <-- I mean wi-fi, not cellular... We know about China Mobile.
Mobile Carts
You should be excelling in this area! Why haven't you designed and started selling clinical wireless carts yet?
Hybrid e-reader/notebook technologyÂ
Line up some notebooks with this screen in mind - http://www.pixelqi.com. Rather than waiting for another laptop company to innovate, get on this bandwagon quickly! Doctors and nurses will eat this up.
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