Skip to main content

"We Just Discovered The Internet and Want The Whole World To Know!"

Glendale (CA) Adventist Medical Center offers its patients in-room web access and e-mail and finds the occasion worthy of a press release.

The hospital believes the service helps it "...stand out from competitors." They may be right, more's the pity.

In a connected world, consumers long-ago learned to expect "anytime, anywhere" connectivity. Even the lowliest coffee shops have been wired for years. So I fail to see how a hospital's quest for strategic separation is aided by ANNOUNCING such a belated entry to the modern world. More likely, they embarrass themselves with further proof (as if more proof was needed) of exactly how far behind the times they'd fallen.

What's next? A press release saying "...all rooms are now air conditioned?"

Yeah I know. I can hear the excuses. "You don't understand...it's a complicated issue...lots of things to worry about...security, privacy, cost, support..." All true. And all misleading from the real headline which should read "We shoulda done this 10 years ago. We weren't paying attention to trends in consumer expectations and didn't understand how important the wired world has become. Now we're having to play catch-up."

Eh, it's difficult admission for a narcissistic industry and probably a bit long for a headline.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare...
Post a Comment
Read more

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...
3 comments
Read more