Healthcare Transformation

Healthcare IT Transformation, Bridging Innovation, Integration, Interoperability, and Analytics, by John C. Dodd, CRC Press  2017

Yayyy - Lahey Burlington named to "Most Wired Hospital" list! 

As someone who has a frequent flyer card to two major medical conglomerates - the Lahey system, and Mass General -  and the leading IT innovator, MIT,  it made sense to see how IT will change processes and delivery systems.  As much as we see parallels in manufacturing IT, we realize that at the point of "delivery" a patient, no matter how clean his paperwork, is not a production order.  Do-overs, scrap, lost orders and politics continue, but the costs of bad results in healthcare - fiscal and personal - seem so much higher, even above the Takata airbag fiasco and VW's diesel woes.  

So lets take a look at this newest healthcare IT offering for author John Dodd's perspective, albeit one that looks beyond processes to the implications of governmental healthcare solutions.  We're wanting more examples of excellent implementations, which Dodd gives us in detail, along with his perspective on the strategic direction of HIT over the next five years.  Like most of us in manufacturing, we are looking for an integrated and purposefully architected approach in healthcare as well, and here the systems get a little spotty.  In some institutions IT has not realized its full potential and sits as a high-powered communicator, one that personnel have been known to disregard.  In other places the system has become a less visible partner that allows patients and their doctors to gather histories, prescription info, films and other necessary basic data on a single server.  And some institutions have graduated to knitting together cooperative cross-corporate systems that give doctors a wider view to diagnostics and on-going patient care, but there is a great distance between the basic communications systems, and the ones like Sloan Kettering that are working to being AI into diagnostics.

Most valuable to readers looking to build an architectural model of healthcare will find Chapter 7, "Analytics Framework for Range of Health Services" most useful.  Aside from Medicare and Medicaid, and other governmental/political issues impacting healthcare, Figure 7.3 illustrates on a single page the design elements, from data collection and quality measures, through national and state reporting requirements, down to measures for specific disease outcomes presented by zipcode and age/gender determinants and patient-consumer risk and trends.  Political issues and public-policy makers are even included in Dodd's overall schema.  Clearly, not all these data elements are in place in all institutions, but the author urges healthcare execs to look at their IT systems with this sort of fully integrated vision in place, an integrated system toward which all system upgrades and modifications should be headed. 

Readers will also pause to consider Figure 12.2. "Waves of Change"  and Figure 12.1 in which Dodd pictures the politics of change and resistance.  Healthcare IT advocates will do well to review his perspective and guidance on how to survive the coming storm.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,