When I first got into healthcare I had tons of those "huh?" moments...
- The failure rate in HCIT seemingly being higher than other industries, by failure i meant project failures - The dozens and dozens of ways to accomplish the same thing depending on type of coverage, practice etc. It seemed to me that every specialty or section in healthcare had their own process to accomplish the same things, which of course vary by organization too. - The separation between clinical staff and IT, kind of like the phrase, the left hand isn't talking to the right, in HC it seemed like the left hand didn't even know the right hand existed. - How far behind HC is, in terms of technology from other industries, to put this in perspective, one of my clients, a major hospital well respected hospital uses hardware that i think may predate myself (i'm in my mid 20's). Also ran into some software that was almost as old as i was too. - Hardware procurement got me, it seemed to take forever to get anything, it took us 1 month to provision resources to buy a 100$ NIC card, in the end we bought it for the client cause after a month the request was still in limbo. In a nutshell healthcare seems to move significantly slower than other industries... that's all for now On 09/02/2010 08:13 PM, fred trotter wrote: > > I really appreciate the wonderful questions and answers that I have gotten > on this question so far. > > However, many of them have been focused on Doctors not understanding > fundamental IT notions. > > This makes sense. Our community is often trying to convince various groups > of doctors to make good leadership decisions, and focusing on the problems > with that process makes it easier to answer "what do doctors not get". > > But I had two parts to my question. The other part was "What do > (non-health) > IT people not get about Health IT. > > To get us started I will start with the most shocking Health IT > reality that > I learned about when I first started in this community: > > The degree to which medical billing impacts the health IT process. I was > shocked by the need for clearinghouses, that X12 was the "new" standard > (dates me, I know) rather than a sensible choice like XML. I was > shocked to > see the arms race between insurance companies reasons for not paying and > doctors justifying expenses... Then the degree to which that process > locked > us into billing ontologies that prevent more reasonable ontologies from > flourishing. > > For those of us on the IT/Programming side, what was a > painful/dramatic/profound lesson that you needed to learn about the way > health IT operates? > > -- > Fred Trotter > http://www.fredtrotter.com > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
