What healthcare can learn from other industries

Working at Perficient gives me the benefit of seeing what other industries are doing with technology and allows me to incorporate those best practices into healthcare solutions. I see information management as one particular place that the experiences of other industries can add a lot of value to healthcare.

The financial, manufacturing, telecommunication, airline, eCommerce, banking… industries have been using quality data for years in order to run their business. In fact, you wouldn’t think of starting a new business in any one of these industries without the ability to collect and evaluate high quality information daily. However, in healthcare, information management expectations are set fairly low. We need to see more of the BI, ECM and SOA knowledge and tools of other industries incorporated into healthcare. It’s not worth stating the benefits here as I think that any healthcare leader understands the value of this information to their business as well as the global value to patients and the healthcare system in general.

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I regularly meet with healthcare executives to discuss information management, data, analytics, BI….. call it what you wish. And two common concerns that I hear are:

1. My financial and clinical data are not tied together
2. I don’t trust the quality of my data

These specific issues have solutions available today – IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, even some open source solutions are readily available – which specifically allow healthcare organizations to bring together information from disparate systems and display that information using a number of different methods (reporting tools, portals…). I will avoid the technical aspects here – you can see what the smart folks at our additional Perficient blogs have to say about BI, ECM, SOA and Portals to learn more.

I’ll close by stating that I have seen these solutions implemented and adding immense value in other industries as well as healthcare – it is truly amazing. If you have set low expectations for the data collection capabilities of your current systems, it is time to take another look.