The healthcare industry is currently nearing the apex of its modernization as the regulatory environment begins to stabilize, EHR adoption soars, and ACOs appear to be well on their way – the dust is beginning to settle after the frenzy of the Affordable Care Act and HITECH, sans the employer insurance mandate, which has now been postponed until 2015. The next leg in this journey is making sense out of the millions of bytes generated by all the technologies being implemented throughout the industry, and how these devices will effectively be able to ‘talk’ to each other.It should come as no surprise to us that the developed world is evolving to become not a connected world, but a hyperconnected world. Therefore, this transformation cannot be achieved in the traditional ‘siloing’ and exclusivity of healthcare professionals, but instead in an open fashion, where the industry embraces and learns to value its non-medical workforce. The reality is that a new breed of professional is emerging, which stems from the intersection of clinical, business, and IT knowledge – which is known as the medical (or biomedical) informatics professional.
Experts from industries like finance, telecom, and travel, can teach us innovative ways to implement various technologies, and use its “big” data derivatives. As an enterprise IT consultant specializing in DataViz and mobility, I can’t count how many times I have run into situations with non-healthcare clients that I thought would seamlessly apply in healthcare. I should mention that I am observing a lot of clients seeking to obtain an ‘end to end’ view of their processes and workflows, in which business intelligence and data visualization play a key role. Because of the dynamic nature of healthcare workflows, I strongly recommend that my clients embrace mobility as a vehicle to connect multiple stakeholders, and when I say mobility, I refer to enterprise mobile applications. After all, healthcare workflows were not designed around an individual sitting down and facing a computer all day.
The beauty of enterprise mobility is that, with a good MDM in place, you can do and create anything that you desire. Healthcare organizations don’t need to shy away from developing their own custom enterprise mobile apps, because they are meant to sit atop an open and scalable data integration layer. Hence, the focus of all CIOs and IT departments shall be on establishing this type of architecture, and let the rest flow with it.
As such, organizations need to ensure that they empower trained non-medical professionals. Programs like Biomedical Informatics and Healthcare Administration, such as those offered by Nova Southeastern University, allow for people with non-clinical backgrounds to attain the necessary knowledge to work within a clinical environment. Involving these people helps balance out the forces, and is also a seed for innovation. In the end, the truth is, that healthcare has got to think outside of the box and learn from other industries and professions.
