While at a CIO reception at the HIMSS-CHIME Forum, I took part in an interesting conversation with a group of CIOs. They were talking about the number of phone calls they get from vendors. They had some unique insights and approaches into how they handled all the incoming messaging from vendors. I’ll save most of those insights for the Healthcare IT Marketing and PR conference that I host, but he also offered this interesting nugget when he said the following:
Our organization more or less has what we need to be successful. We aren’t looking to add more.
He did later acknowledge that if that wasn’t true, that they would go out and search for the vendors as opposed to an incoming call from a sales person.
This CIO’s comment struck me. I don’t think he was being so arrogant as to say that they weren’t going to purchase any more IT solutions. However, I think he was saying that he didn’t see any major enterprise purchases on his horizon.
On the one hand, I think that’s a sign of a maturing of the industry. His hospital organization finally had the IT tools they needed to be successful. That’s a good thing since I think if we’d had the conversation 3-5 years ago it would have been very different.
On the other hand, it’s kind of scary to think that this hospital CIO isn’t really looking at the IT environment around him and looking for new tools and solutions that could make his organization even better. This is a simple illustration of how every IT organization can get in a rut and stop innovating if we’re not careful.
At some point in any IT implementation, you have to step back and double down on the investments you’ve already made. There are huge opportunities in every healthcare organization I’ve seen to maximize the benefits they’re receiving from the IT they’ve already implemented. It’s fair to say that this CIO was at that stage of the game. It was time to stop searching and implementing other systems and time to optimize what’s already in place. That’s a good thing as long as it’s not taken too far.
I think the hospital health IT industry is largely in the same place as this CIO. Most aren’t looking to make new purchases. Instead, they want to extract value out of their previous purchases. What do you think? Have you seen this same sort of market maturity? Any idea on what will be next that will change this CIO and the industry’s thinking?
