CODE RED – How Proprietary HIT Vendors May Screw Up Health Reform
by Bill Burns on July 15, 2009
Well a little vacation time did nothing to help my golf game but I did get the chance to catchup on my reading and believe tme there was a ton of it. By and far the most interesting peice I have read in some time was Phillip Longman’s overview of how proprietary vendors and protocols may jeopardize any reforms that make it into the marketplace.
Longman:
“Twenty years after the digital revolution, only an astonishing 1.5 percent of hospitals have integrated information technology systems. Almost all experts agree that in order to begin to deal with the problems of the health care system, this has to change.”
Comments (1)
joseph martins on 15 Jul 2009 at 2:02 pm
I only skimmed Longman’s article, but substantial personal experience tells me that the problem transcends vendors.
It is important to understand that lock-in is a function of system complexity regardless the level of “openness”. Openness, by itself, does little to reduce complexity. And as complexity increases, so too does the threat of lock-in. It’s virtually unavoidable. We’re not talking about simple stand-alone applications operating without any interdependencies.
How many incompatible custom systems have been developed on so-called open standards and protocols over the years? Too many. People tend to knock vendors about interoperability and the cost and complexity of migrating from their products to alternatives, but the products of internal development teams usually aren’t any better.
I challenge your readers to name a single relatively complex system that doesn’t lock-in its users once the system has been fully integrated into an infrastructure that produces millions of managed and unmanaged information assets.
I touch on a few relevant points in an older article about the lock-in bogeyman (in th context of buy vs build):
http://www.datamobilitygroup.com/saltworks/archives/5
