“Healthcare [provider] organizations are not technology companies, nor should they be. However, they stand to benefit the most from effective, efficient and judicious application of advanced technology. This application will have real-world impact, not only on cost but on actually saving lives. The aggressive and intelligent use of technology ensures that healthcare organizations have a better chance of mastering their destinies.”
I agree heartily with the foregoing excerpt from Alexander Sicular’s February 24, 2017 article in Health Data Management entitled “HIT Think 4 keys to managing the latest healthcare IT developments” (http://bit.ly/2lxbKbY) in which article Mr. Sicular (a solutions architect for Basho, a developer of NoSQL distributed database technology) offers the following recommendations and observations regarding “… the aggressive and intelligent use of [information] technology [IT] …” by healthcare providers (underscore added for emphasis):
“Often, healthcare organizations don’t give technically oriented people a large enough platform from which to voice ideas about technology purchases. This leads to healthcare organizations buying technology that appears cheaper today results in higher costs later.
For instance, the timeframe for deploying large-scale systems, including electronic health records, scheduling systems, billing systems and lab-management systems is often measured in years. That long ramp-up period can be costly and only prolongs the use of outdated systems. As such, technology is often viewed as a high-cost endeavor, and money spent on technology transitions can’t be spent elsewhere, such as increasing budgets to attract top talent.
Healthcare organizations must signal to talent that they take technology seriously and that those interested in joining them will have plenty of opportunity to wield new technology to make a difference. Open systems will enable the best and brightest to bring new ideas forward and test them in a safe and secure environment, such as those created with open APIs and standards. This is the kind of environment that attracts top talent—not only the technical kind, but those with academic and scientific acumen as well. Increasingly, scientists and physicians want to work in organizations in which they can get data that will further research.
This shift is already becoming more apparent as younger physicians who have been exposed to technology throughout their lives are now moving into leadership positions. There is a growing movement to cross-train physicians in more technological fields to become chief medical information officers (CMIOs). Graduate public health education concentrations that once focused exclusively on health-centric disciplines are beginning to morph into hybrid technologically focused degrees.
Leading healthcare organizations are also promoting broader professional development in technology. Doctors attend conferences and want to keep up with technology trends. They realize that organizations that do not adopt technology as quickly as their peers will lose ground to, and may even be acquired by, their peers.”
The Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service (CHARTSaaS) reference architecture (RA) provides the opportunity described by Mr. Sicular. Specifically, the CHARTSaaS RA provides an IT template for cloud-based (i.e. — Internet-accessible data center maintained and managed by a cloud service provider a.k.a. CSP company) subscription software that enables healthcare provider subject matter experts to design, develop and deploy cognitive support applications a.k.a. “apps” that interoperably leverage installed electronic health record (EHR) systems using enterprise service bus (ESB) and other state-of-the-art interoperability technical tactics. These apps are continuously operating or conditionally launched automated processes that may include complex event monitoring, similarity and predictive analysis, rules-based actions and choreography of system and staff tasks. Certainly they include IT capabilities and opportunities sufficient to attract the top IT talent that Mr. Sicular opines is sorely needed by healthcare providers. Please validate this statement to your own satisfaction by reviewing the details of CHARTSaaS and the CHARTSaaS RA in these presentations, and then by imagining a CHARTSaaS-enabled IT solution:
Healthcare providers and their patients will benefit significantly from appreciating and then applying a CHARTSaaS RA-compliant IT solution. To do so will mitigate medical mistakes (currently the third leading cause of patient deaths, per Makaray and Daniel, http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139), thereby minimizing patient adverse events; and also will optimize clinical case outcomes while maximizing the cost-effectiveness of care and treatment and accelerating the accrual of medical knowledge.