Anthony Guerra, founder/editor, hsCIO.com
While all organizations have mission statements and basic objectives, the ability to morph those on the fly can be key to success or failure. Of course, it’s better when the organization itself determines the changes, and they’re not imposed from outside. That’s because outside entities can, of course, change their minds. I felt that way after listening to the latest meeting of the Health IT Policy Committee, the group that’s mandated to advise the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT on the definition of what constitutes the “meaningful use” of electronic medical records … Read the rest of this column at Information Week.
PaulLaRiviere says
Although I’ve not yet caught up with yesterday’s HIT Policy Committee transcript, Anthony, I’m not altogether surprised by your summary observation that the committee’s efforts – while gracious and methodical – don’t seem to be reflecting the same sense of urgency that’s so evident in current and prospective market players.
This top-down approach that’s dominating the industry right now reflects the underlying belief that this market (indeed, perhaps ANY market) can be *designed* (as opposed to merely encouraging its growth) as long as the design effort is endowed with sufficient influence, adequate willpower, plenty of money … oh, and force of law (if you can get it!). The critical inadequacy of that belief is that it simply discounts away the millions upon millions of individual decisions that actually energize a marketplace. Each one of those decisions takes time and effort, and most of them are interdependent in known and unknown ways. I think that the apparent substitution of these design efforts, in a way that eclipses the necessity for demand-driven growth, unavoidably blunts the typical intensity of the ‘leading edge’.
So, having abstracted away a crucial characteristic of the market, what’s the big deal about changing a certification criterion here, or an standard there. Your admonition, while very well stated, seems unlikely to gain traction with the right players, who are working from a profoundly different model, any time soon. And certainly, not soon enough.