Just Enough Technology Should Be Your Goal

The recent PwC US Health Research Institute report on how providers trail payers and pharma/life science companies on their ability to exchange data, to me is a reflection on several things. It says that providers sometimes have been sold systems that are so complex, the data can't pass between them easily.

Other providers have either been too cash-strapped or too skeptical to adopt those systems in the first place, so they're still perilously close to keeping records on paper.

Think back just a few years, when IT systems were still pretty fragile. There was no such thing as backup to the cloud. Now, the ThinkPad my new employer sent me automatically backs up my documents and other work to the cloud on a regular basis. Before such backup tech was available, I wouldn't dream of asking a small medical practice to rely upon a PC-based solution. More data has been lost to accident (or accidental deletion) than any virus or lost laptop could ever be blamed for.

Not that backup to the cloud is a panacea. We've got HIPAA and other compliance laws to worry about. Cloud security isn't a settled topic by a long shot.

But back to this notion of Just Enough Technology. You run hospitals. You're not in the data center business. And yet, you are, because security, privacy, and availability dictate it.

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