I’ve heard this argument too many times in the last few weeks. It’s become a goat we’re going to beat to death if we aren’t careful. Articles in Business 2.0 and Wired, and in next month’s FastCompany, talk about the inefficiencies in IT healthcare, and propose “simple” solutions to these problems.

Well, I’ve only just arrived in IT healthcare, but it’s already very very apparent how false this is, and just how much these “simple” solutions will cause. So, forgive the following rant if you’re of the opinion that throwing a few million bucks at the problem will solve it.

I work in IT in healthcare. It’s not as simple as it looks from the outside in. I mean, our pager system is worth 2.2M$, and requires upgrading every 3 years to keep up with demand. That’s just for paging. Nevermind online patient records, a phone system larger than that of most cities, and no new funding from the government…

People don’t want to see their healthcare costs increase, even if it means they’ll go down in 2-3 years (dramatically). And if new dollars are poured in, doctors eat them up with primary patient care services. So, the likelyhood of getting a large IT-only project approved is slim to nil.

Add to that that most hospitals are part of regional entities where multiple OS’s, authentication systems, email servers and NOS’s operate and a fairly simple IT application becomes very complicated, very quickly.

Case and point. Cross-site file sharing. It requires 4 servers, and 50K in software. Just to share data between sites. Not to mention all of the auditing software that needs to be in place because people are concerned about their privacy.

I’m all for increased IT automation in healthcare, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as simple as just throwing 100M$ at the problem. We’re talking several billion dollars, easy.

So, no, I don’t buy the “IT in healthcare needs to wise up” argument. The IT people in healthcare are probably the most professional and knowledgeable I’ve ever worked with (certainly more than those in IT and software industries) for the very reason that they have to do so much with so little. The solutions that they come up with (and I will come up with soon enough) are incredible.

Thanks ;-)