I’ve been talking a lot lately with people about how we take the health IT discoveries made at one hospital and apply them to another hospital. In a recent conversation I had with Jonathan Sheldon from Oracle, he highlighted that “Many organizations don’t care about research, but just want a product that works.”
I agree completely with this comment from Jonathan. While there are some very large healthcare organizations that do a lot of research, there are even more healthcare organizations that just want to see patients in the best way possible. They just want to implement the research that other organizations have done. They just want something that works.
The problem for big companies like Oracle, SAP, Tableau, etc is that they have the technology to scale up many of these health IT discoveries, but they aren’t doing the discovery themselves. In fact, most of them never will dive into the discovery of which healthcare data really matters.
In order to solve this, I’ve seen all of these organizations working on some sort of partnership between IT companies and healthcare research organizations. The IT company provides the technology and the commercialization of the product and the healthcare research organization provides the research knowledge on the most effective techniques.
While this all sounds very simple and logical, it’s actually much harder in practice. Taking your customer and turning them into a partner is much harder than it looks. Most healthcare organizations know how to be customers. It takes a unique healthcare organization to be an effective partner. However, this is exactly what we have to do if we want to operationalize the health IT discoveries these research organizations make.
We’re going to have to make this a reality. There’s no way that one organization can discover everything they need to discover. Healthcare is too complex as it is today. Plus, we’re just getting started with things like genomic medicine and health sensors which is going to make healthcare at least an order of magnitude more complex.