{"id":1256,"date":"2009-03-23T19:34:57","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T23:34:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=1256"},"modified":"2009-03-23T19:34:57","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T23:34:57","slug":"how-well-will-hospitals-adapt-to-their-new-100-million-it-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/23\/how-well-will-hospitals-adapt-to-their-new-100-million-it-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"How well will hospitals adapt to their new $100 million IT systems?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday evening I visited a friend at Howard University Medical Center, near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.\u00a0 The neighborhood isn’t the best so I brought my Canon EOS 5D Mark II<\/a>\"\" into the hospital rather than leave it in the car.\u00a0 This set off a three-alarm security emergency involving multiple guards and a senior hospital administrator.\u00a0 “We can’t have cameras in the hospital because of patient privacy.”\u00a0 Could I leave the camera with them?\u00a0 “We can’t be responsible for your camera and won’t accept it.”\u00a0 How about mobile phones?\u00a0 Were they allowed in the hospital?\u00a0 “Of course,” the senior administrator responded.\u00a0 Don’t all mobile phones these days also have cameras and oftentimes video?\u00a0 “Yes.”<\/p>\n

Here we have a business apparently determined to prevent anyone from coming in and photographing patients.\u00a0 Yet they haven’t figured out which of their rules they need to change in response to the phenomenon of camera phones, devices that appeared nearly 10 years ago.\u00a0 They’ve stuck with their paper records in filing cabinets, writing with magic markers on whiteboards in patient rooms, and other manual procedures.\u00a0 The U.S. government is now telling this hospital that they need to adopt some of the world’s most complex software.\u00a0 A university hospital in the Boston area, considered one of the most sophisticated in the world, recently spent $60 million on a new IT system from Cerner, a market leader in the field.\u00a0 So far the results have been disastrous, despite the fact that all of the personnel were accustomed to using an electronic medical record system (home-grown starting around 1990).<\/p>\n

The enterprises that have been the most successful users of IT have been the best-managed enterprises, such as Walmart.\u00a0 Hospitals\u00a0don’t have the same competitive pressures as Walmart and historically have not worried as much about management or efficiency.\u00a0 If they have resisted computerization, perhaps it is because they had a good idea of what their organization could handle.<\/p>\n

This March 17, 2009 Washington Post op-ed makes the same point: “Bad Bet on Medical Records”<\/a>.\u00a0 What do folks think?\u00a0 Will this be a waste of $50 billion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday evening I visited a friend at Howard University Medical Center, near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.\u00a0 The neighborhood isn’t the best so I brought my Canon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHow well will hospitals adapt to their new $100 million IT systems? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/23\/how-well-will-hospitals-adapt-to-their-new-100-million-it-systems\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How well will hospitals adapt to their new $100 million IT systems? 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