- Image by Patrick Q via Flickr
One of the great pleasures in covering health IT is I get to watch a fast-forward recapitulation of the last 30 years in technology.
While the mainstream tech world is focused on open source and open standards, transparently arrived at, the health IT realm is hoping it can just get Microsoft’s innovation, plug and play.
Over at e-care management, health IT advocate David Kibbe discussed this while I was out of the country.
He quoted the Annals of Family Medicine on efforts to create a “Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH),” a tech-driven cooperative among doctors and nurses aimed at cost-effective patient wellness:
Technology needed in a PCMH is not “plug and play.” The hodge-podge of information technology marketed to primary care practices resembles more a pile of jigsaw pieces than components of an integrated and interoperable system.
The solutions being offered by major medical vendors like GE and Allscripts have more in common with what Digital Equipment and Wang were offering in the 1970s than anything from the 21st century, Kibbe wrote.
Once plug and play standards are established, as Windows established them in the 1990s, then modular development leads to specialization, what folks in the business call “best of breed” solutions. But this does not yet exist in health IT, and the CCHIT certification process does not seem focused on creating them.
The result is that best of breed vendors have to build their own Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), each one reinventing the wheel.
For the rest of this wonderful article please see the ZDNet Blog here.
