PingBack from http://articles.icmcc.org/2009/01/18/message-to-washington-its-all-about-outcomes/

I think your testimony to congress was on point.  It is not so much that we throw "technology" at the problem and hope for the best.  It is that we use technology in the correct way to affect change.  

Maybe Microsoft can help by creating an incubation program (or somehow extend BizSpark) for health care technology companies that use Microsoft Technologies/Tools (.NET/Visual Studio/HealthVault/etc...) in order to show the government how innovation can come from the private sector.  

-sanjay

While I agree with your point about the need for improving outcomes to be the larger objective, I do not think the comparison with the moon mission is apples-to-apples. Moon was a specific object in space, the distance to it was known and what lay between Earth to Moon was also pretty much known. "Improving Health Outcome" is like saying "Let us go further in space". It means so many different things to so many different people. Hence there have been so many different solutions that have been tried - each an evolutionary attempt to "go further".

Given the lack of specificity of the objective, if we have to have a chance at "going further into space", we need to keep on equiping our "astronauts" with better rockets (of course, built collaboratively by the rocket scientists & astronauts). Generic Tools and their usage & outcomes are not necessarily always deterministic (and are more often exponential in their impact on productivity).

For example, the PC was not designed for you and I to interchange our ideas on your blog - but that is exactly what we are doing - as the PC has made the process of knowledge sharing efficient in unimaginable ways. And this example is just a tiny example of PC led productivity improvement.

In Healthcare, our focus needs to be on building the generic tools right now, rather than getting bogged down in the specifics of hard to define lofty objectives. We need to build the base tools to start with, faciliatate their adaption, and Doctors (being one of the most educated, high IQ section of our population) will come up with ideas that can help us further improve the tools and incrementally improve the outcomes.

Back in the 70s & 80s, we did not start building the PC with a color LCD screen, 4GB RAM, 300GB hard disk and quad core processors (these specs where almost unimaginable for a PC). We built what we could, we built what was at the cutting edge of technology back then, and then we evolved as smart users found new uses and new needs.

The bottom line is that let us start putting the building blocks in place now with EHRs and HIEs. With the arrival of a medical workforce born in the internet era, adaption is bound to increase in ways we might not be able to think now.

Peter Neupert, Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group and my grand-grand-boss,

The current hot, behind-the-scenes, debate in HIT is around how “meaningful use” of HIT will be defined