Unfortunately, most of us as technologists don’t understand clinicians’ jobs very well. We end up giving clinical providers what we believe is a solution to their problem based on our understanding. We make a web application or a mobile application of some sort and give it to them telling that this is the solution to your problem. In reality, we are giving them a monolithic application which doesn’t understand their actual workflows. It is just like, we, as programmers, never want one giant application solution given to us to use. We like things that are small and nimble and easy for us to adapt and put to different uses than initially intended by designers. We like simple things put together to solve our problems. That is a traditional technique that we programmers have used for time immemorial. That is just the way that we work, it was the way UNIX was created, and it is the way that programmers do things. We create little snippets of code, we take another snippets that someone else has written, and tie them together. That kind of approach is what is sorely lacking in the healthcare space because it’s very permissions-oriented. Clinicians, especial nurses that have some of the hardest jobs, have to get permission before doing new things with technology.
In the end, the answer to your question is very, very simple. The only people that will create actual solutions to healthcare outcomes problems are going to be clinicians because that’s their job. Our job, in the technical industry is to create the proper tools, techniques, infrastructure, and these design surfaces where they don’t have to pick up monolithic things and use them but instead, have portions of monolithic things that they can put together and go forward on.
What I am saying would sound completely insane for someone who has been in clinical practice for 50 years and is about to retire. He would never want to go through any of the latest technology stuff or mobile applications since he is about to retire.
I am actually talking about the residents, the students and the folks that have been in the industry for probably less than 10 years. They think just like we do in any technical community. They don’t think in terms of monolithic anything. They think in terms of these small easy to assemble components and that is unfortunately not the way the health IT world works today.
Summarizing the answer to your question, if you’re looking at retrospective documentation to store what happened about a patient in the past, that is a terrific thing to leave to the existing firms but new firms must be created to do everything else. In fact as an angel investor and an entrepreneur, most of my thinking these days is around how do we fund and build these companies that can help create small reusable components that we can put together and put them in the hands of development friendly or script friendly clinicians? Only they know their job and their job changes during the day enough that no monolithic apps we give them, monolithic will work for all situations.
Chris: That’s awesome. Shahid. I think it has been a great insight to healthcare IT, where we’re at and hopefully painting a bit of a picture of where we’re going. I think there are a lot of exciting times ahead for healthcare IT, and opportunity probably most importantly in what we’re doing. Thank you for your time today and we really appreciate it.
