The Health Care Blog: Is Healthcare IT Ready for its Big Coming Out Party?. It should go without saying, but I will say it anyway, because each industry seems to learn these lessons in their own unique way, that HIT implementations are by definition wicked problems. Whether a covered entity ("CE") goes with the market leader is no guarantee of success. We will be reading much more about EHR disasters in the coming months and years as the health care industry becomes the latest casualty of the people, process and platform conundrum.
Succinctly stated, HIT/EHR implementations are wicked problems to a large degree because people and process issues are ignored while providers focus on technology. All three components are mission critical and clearly, given the complexity, even the platform (read technology) component is "totally non trivial" to get right. So what is the solution? There are NO cookbook solutions, that is part of the definition of a wicked problem. Expect to be confronted with significant "unexpected challenges" and be prepared to iterate your way through them; in short, the best advice is to fail forward fast.
As counter intuitive as fail forward fast may seem (i.e. even more so in the heath care industry where anything that smacks of failure is anathema), this is right prescription but will almost universally not be followed. Why? Because as a society we appear to be hell bent on using engineering methodologies even in cases where agile methodologies are clearly called for. The latter has "failure cycles" built-in while the former is obsessed with getting the right answer.
There is no right answer. The answer will be different for every CE by definition. Add to this mix a completely transformed legal regulatory landscape and the challenges ahead appear daunting to say the least. If you want a fighting chance to succeed then you must start with accepting the premise that your organization must first change the way it thinks about the problem. This is no small feat.
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