What does healthcare look like in five years?

We still have a murky picture of healthcare and how it moves from the current position where quality is only seen in small pockets and to a future vision where quality of care is not based on where you live- I think it is pretty universal to say we need to empower both patients and healthcare professionals to make better decisions based on facts and accurate data.

What we still don’t know is how to get there- there lots of ideas but I do know we need new data to make logical decisions.

There is an amazing debate occurring in healthcare right now. It is about what the role of the “healthcare” technologies are in care delivery. Unfortunately, everyone is obsessed with electronic healthcare records rather than the larger picture of information management and application portfolio management which seem to me, based on client conversations, to be the root cause of the problem. I might be wrong- and that is why I have built a survey (see the link below to share it widely).

I am hoping we are finally reaching that point where people realize that just like every other industry, information management is a multi-application, multi technology problem.

Mary Pat Whaley has a really good blog on this called “Who’s Listening to Our EHR Issues?”

To me it is already clear that the answer is no one — and the EHR vendors are putting gag orders to ensure that the public doesn’t realize just how bad the product is!

The rockhealth.com weekly is a great way to keep up the debate (here is the Sept 14th 2015 one with the EHR gag articles)

While I like a good rant as much- if not more- then the next person. I also would like to be part of the solution. Unfortunately there is very little data available on what has worked, what is needed and what the priorities are across the various stakeholders in care, administration and IT.

I wrote this 7 years ago.

Unfortunately it is still accurate. One of the reasons I joined Opentext is to do things differently and we have, we recently ran a healthcare hackathon and we continue to push for for developers to think about the big challenges – and we have set up tools to teach them; we have a YouTube channel a GitHub and we have a 90 day trial so you can test the full services

How would you change healthcare?