Where IS Health Care Going? Technology Leader’s Presentation

Last week, JoAnn Becker  and I ran an interactive discussion with the monthly TLA Manager’s breakfast meeting here in Chicago. We had a lively and excellent debate among a group of technology executives, health care executives, and other smart people about the real challenges of successfully deploying information technology to improve productivity and quality in delivering health care in this country.

That, of course, is an immense issue and would could barely scratch the surface in the hour we had. For those who are interested, we’ve uploaded our slides to Slideshare.

 

We used two recent TV ads from GE and IBM to kick off the discussion. On the surface, each provides a sense for the promise of information technology to make health care more effective:

GE TV ad – Doctors
IBM TV Ad – “Data Baby”

In the tradition of all good technology vendor advertising, both also completely gloss over the complex organizational adaptation and evolution necessary to bring these hypothetical worlds into being. They also gloss over the existing institutional and industry complexity that needs to be understood and addressed through a combination of design, leadership, and management.

Fred  Brooks, professor of computer science at UNC and author of The Mythical Man-Month : Essays on Software Engineering, draws a critical distinction in the final chapter of the book, which is titled "No Silver Bullet," between accidental and essential complexity. His point is that software is so difficult to design and develop because it must successfully model the essential complexity of the domain it addresses. Technology and software efforts can stumble on a variety of barriers and roadblocks, but failing to understand and address essential complexity is the worst.

Health care provides its own mix of accidental and essential complexity. If the decision makers aren’t careful to draw distinctions between accidental and essential, then a great deal of time and effort will be expended without corresponding returns. On the one hand, we may simply succeed in "speeding up the mess" as my friend Benn Konsynski so liked to put it. Or, we may obliterate  essential complexities in a quest for uniformity and productivity that is blind to those complexities. Or, finally, we may invest the appropriate level of design time and talent in systems that account for essential complexity and eliminate accidental complexity.

Resources

We drew on a variety of excellent resources in preparing for this talk and wanted to make them more easily available here.

Here are several books that provide useful context and background

Here are pointers to a variety of health care related web resources worth paying attention to:

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