Down To Business: Can The Healthcare Industry Handle All This IT?

Likewise, says Allscripts' Tullman, "today we're building the operating system for the future of healthcare. This country can't afford its healthcare system anymore, so something's got to change. We can no longer buy our way out of the problem."

Tullman dices the healthcare provider market into haves and have-nots: the "Rolls-Royce" integrated delivery networks, which take a long-term view of IT strategy and represent about 7% of that market; and the other 93%, which need a government shove because they lack the scale, money, and ambition to think really big and long term about IT investment and innovation on their own.

One of the integrated delivery networks among the 7% of haves is University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which doesn't just buy technology but also establishes equity joint ventures with leading technology vendors, including IBM and GE, and invests in tech startups, such as dbMotion, developer of a SOA-based health system interoperability platform. Meantime, among the 93% of have-nots, those small to midsize hospitals and practices being pulled into the electronic age, is there the risk that their IT investments will slow considerably when the myriad incentives and penalties run their course? "There's always that possibility when you have government earmarks," says UPMC CMIO Dan Martich. "But it wouldn't change what we do one iota."

Overall, Martich sees federal government intervention in healthcare IT as positive. He quotes a Chinese proverb: "May you come to the attention of authority."

We'll know that healthcare IT is an all-encompassing, sustainable movement when--absent government carrots and sticks--providers across the board invest in it as a matter of competitive advantage, even survival. In many other industries, from retail banking to package delivery to hospitality to complex manufacturing, companies understand that their consumer and business customers pick them and stay with them based in part on the quality of the technology experience they deliver. In some sectors, like high-frequency securities trading, where a millisecond advantage can yield returns in the many millions of dollars and where CIOs call application development an "arms race," the link between IT and competitive advantage is patently obvious.

Not so much in healthcare. We'll know IT has become just as important to healthcare providers as it is to other industries when patients start differentiating one hospital or doctors' practice from another based on technical sophistication. North Shore LIJ Health System in suburban New York, for example, plans to advertise the fact that it's spending as much as $400 million over five years to subsidize EHR systems for its 5,800 affiliated physicians as well as 1,200 staff physicians--sending the message to potential patients that state-of-the-art care is linked directly to the free-flowing exchange of information.

Will patients respond? Will other providers? And what if malpractice insurance rates were tied to things like electronic record keeping, e-prescriptions, and analytics-based clinical decision support? Would more providers get on the IT train then?

One thing's for sure: Whether the government or open market dictates the pace of IT change in healthcare, this train is leaving the station.

Rob Preston,
VP and Editor in Chief, InformationWeek
[email protected]

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