The Healthcare IT Guy

Many of my younger colleagues often ask about what some of the most important leadership aspects are for technical managers like team leads or architects. There are no hard and fast rules but here are some things I’ve learned over the years:

• Make Decisions. This is one of the most important aspects of leadership — just making a decision and not analyzing for weeks or months. No amount of evidence or information will ever “be enough” and at some point you’ll need to make a decision. Your team can see if you are timid or if you take risks. Leadership is about decision making and if your decision making skills or risk taking ability are limited, don’t bother trying to lead. I’ve seen many architects and so-called “team leads” that try to get their bosses to make their decisions for them so they don’t get in trouble for making “the wrong ones”. Big mistake.
• Lead by Example. Leadership is about direction and if you want to lead, you’ll need to make sure you take charge and establish that you know where you want to go. But, be prepared to demonstrate that you do what you ask your team to do. If you ask everyone else to do something but don’t do it yourself, your team will lose respect.
• Be transparent. You work with bright people and although they may not be your equals in experience or knowledge, they will know when you are making decisions based on whim or reason. If you can’t explain your decisions in a way that your team can comprehend then you’re not a good leader.
• Mentor. Good leaders create the next group of leaders, not just bark orders. If you’re not regularly mentoring and training, you’re not doing your job. And, if you mentor well you can let your team make many of the decisions without you and you’ll be able to trust that their decisions will be as good as yours.
• Be inclusive. You’re the leader and can make all the decisions and everyone knows that. But, if you’re not including input from everyone you’re losing valuable data and a chance to build a cohesive team.

The National Institute of Health Commercialization Program (NIH-CAP), designed to assist promising life science companies bring their technologies to market, is a nation wide program funded by NIH and managed and executed by Larta. The Larta Institute invited me to talk to this season’s group about my thoughts on Healthcare IT, Media, and Training. Here’s what I told them.

Healthcare Industry Fallacies

I started with a brief discussion about how selling to the healthcare community is very hard but not for the reasons they might think. I mentioned that:

• Healthcare folks are neither technically challenged nor simple techno-phobes. Because they are in the business of saving lives and improving health, they care about technologies that help them achieve their mission.
• Most product decisions are no longer made by clinical folks alone, CIOs are fully involved. Don’t try to sell just to the clinical folks — make sure the IT side is engaged and on your side.
• Complex, full-featured, products are not easier to sell than simple, stand alone tools that have the capability of interoperating with other solutions are much easier to sell. Software as a service is a good approach.
• Hospitals will not buy unless one proves value. This seems obvious but most startups think that because they think something is important, their customers will just agree.
• Selling into doctors offices is not easy. There were a few startups looking to sell to individual physicians’ offices. I told them selling to to your first dozen physicians is pretty easy since we all know doctors. Just be careful, though, since selling to the next dozen and beyond is where companies fall.

Conducting Market Research

Lots of startups don’t do basic market research so I suggested the following approach:

• Find the right search terms for your industry or product. Don’t be esoteric. Because startups will only be found through word of mouth or on the Internet, don’t choose terms to describe yourself that no one else understands. Selling to hospitals is not about creativity, it’s about value. If the customer doesn’t understand what you’re selling give up now.
• Use competitive intelligence to locate your competitors and existing firms. The easiest way is to use Internet search. Once you know your competitors, call them up and ask them about client references Call up their clients and talk to them about their products and services and what can be improved.

How Tech can help Healthcare today (what areas are good to get into)

• Fraud detection and improved billing (revenue cycle management)
• Offshoring. Inshoring.
• Convergence of healthcare IT and clinical engineering.
• Virtual clinicians in radiology and ICU monitoring.
• Data interoperability for medical records.

What types of Business Models to Consider

• Software as a Service (SaaS) and subscription model  — best model for startups with something they can maintain in their own data centers
• Consulting and Solutions model – when you can provide packaged help
• Licensed model – when privacy or complexity requires solutions to be installed in house
• Freemium model (and open source)

Some Success Criteria

• Make sure your company and its value is easy to explain
• Make sure your value is defendable and differentiated (but without being esoteric)
• Make sure that you have ability to attract partners and can either create or be part of an ecosystem
• Ensure that you have word of mouth opportunity
• Have scaleable staff and systems
• Have a scaleable product — build once, sell many times
• Have an uncomplicated pricing and deployment model
• Be very focused — you can’t “solve healthcare” but you can solve very specific problems
• Try to own the relationship with and information about customers — don’t rely on partners that won’t give you access to customers

I stumbled upon OrganizedWisdom.com, a collaborative health information community, a few weeks ago and was intrigued by their premise of allowing people to “share their health wisdom” in an easy to use manner. It combines professional and user-generated health content with social networking technologies to help people make the most informed health decisions possible. I thought it was such a great idea that I reached out to Unity Stoakes, President and co-founder of OrganizedWisdom.com, to talk about why he thinks social computing matters in healthcare and how we can all participate. Here’s what he said.

Collaboration is nothing new to the health care industry. Scientists, physicians, health organizations, and educational institutions have networked, shared information, and worked together to solve the world’s biggest health care challenges forever. But only recently, as a result of new Internet technologies, have individuals been empowered to join this same discussion in a meaningful, collective way.
Here are 10 ways social computing may be the most disruptive and positive force to ever impact the healthcare industry.

1. Information Windows Have Closed
New health-focused social networks, search engines and content distributors are making it easier for anyone to have access to the same information at the same time. That means the health care industry needs to educate consumer patients at the same time they educate physicians. Consumers now have access to information that was once privileged only to the industry. Social computing makes it possible for almost anyone to quickly arm themselves with information, ask more questions, and take charge of their health decisions like never before.

2. Collaboration is Making Us Smarter
Now that it’s less expensive, faster, and easy for health groups, physicians, health organizations, and consumers to connect and collaborate, everyone is getting smarter. People are learning about new treatments, alternative solutions, less expensive options, and helping each other connect the dots with complicated health issues.

3. It’s Now Possible to Dialog Directly with Patients
For the most part, the health care industry has been based on the “few to many” approach to communications, marketing, product development, etc. Technology is making it possible (and necessary) for the industry to connect with all of their constituencies in a more personalized, relevant way. These new direct links with consumer patients, for example, could mean better product design, new treatments, more effective trials, and ultimately more personalized health solutions.

4. Transparency is a Requirement
Social networks are lifting the veil of an often blurry and complex industry. People want to understand more about the companies providing their health care. They are learning about alternative treatments. And they are demanding a more open and forthright culture from the industry. Social networks are breeding savvy consumers, who are giving their trust to those who are opening the curtain and helping communicate in more transparent ways.

5. Word of Mouth Marketing
Friends and family have shared and spread important wisdom since the beginning of time. But now, via social networks, they can do so with a click of a button. This means that industry marketers will need to rethink how they focus their efforts. They must figure out transparent and effective ways to leverage word of mouth marketing in a hyper-connected world.

6. Knowledge Now Lives Forever
Over time community driven knowledge bases will become smarter and more meaningful. Archived information, shared wisdom, and personal experience has a much longer life span than ever before.

7. Wisdom of Crowds
The collective experience from millions can now be assembled to help people see trends, make decisions, and learn what worked (or didn’t work) for millions of other people. Access to this data will change how people make their health care decisions in the future, and perhaps impact the very types of health related products and services that become available.

8. The Long Tail Effect
Health care will open up to thousands of new micro-segments, as the health industry, learns that there is big business in small niche focused health care needs. There will be new treatments and solutions for even the most rare of health conditions. It is also likely, that social networks will make it easier for the health care industry to identify new areas they need to focus on developing solutions for.

9. Costs Driven Down
Over time, education and collaboration will force the industry to find innovative ways to keep costs down. People will get better access to health care at more affordable prices because they will be able to find other options and new solutions.

10. Privacy Fears Replaced by a Culture of Collaborative Action
For many important reasons, personal privacy is critical when health issues are concerned. But as we are seeing online in message boards, blogs, and Web sites, many are standing up and saying: I want to share my wisdom to help other people. Social networks that empower consumers and put them in control of their personal health information, are giving individuals the choice to make decisions about what they share and what they don’t. This new culture of openness will require additional protections, but overall we will all benefit from a more intelligent and collaborative base of knowledge, experience and progress.
It is exciting to see all of the innovation occurring in the health care industry today. New technologies, empowered consumers, and better information, will ultimately help us all. Those companies who learn to participate transparently, and leverage the force of these new networks, will ultimately succeed.

For more about these trends, visit the OrganizedWisdom blog at http://wisdom.blogs.com or their new site at http://www.organizedwisdom.com.

For years technology strategists like myself have been working with business folks and C-Suite executives complaining that “you IT guys are too techie” or “you guys just get don’t understand the business”. Many CIOs and architects have been relegated to obscurity because of this perception. In the days when computers were new and technology was not integral to the business, it was ok that the “business guys” were frustrated with the “geeks” if they talked tech but those days are long gone. Tech ignorance among the business suite should not be tolerated because there is almost no area of our economy where technology and its applications like IT are the domain of a single department. This is especially true in healthcare.

Firms lose out when technology staff members are not integral parts of strategy and decision making processes. Given the central role of technology in many organizations, IT folks have some of the most knowledge about the way your business actually works (as opposed to the way it’s perceived to work). Given that many business processes are already automated and many or going to be, it’s only natural that technologists will understand the business because without understanding it they couldn’t have automated it. Of course, I’m not naive enough to believe that all technology professionals are equally adept business folks but it’s time to not treat them as separate groups.

What about the business side? There is equal frustration, well deserved in many cases, that many executives “don’t get technology” and ignore the time-tested and prudent advice of IT folks. We need more execs who value business technology (BT) knowledge, get trained, or at least understand that it’s important. When hiring senior executives, it’s just as important to ensure that they know technology as it is for them to understand the basics of finance and marketing.

Business Technology and IT knowledge is crucial in a competitive environment and senior executives should foster that by including questions about tech in their interviewing and hiring process.

If you’re a CIO or an architect or other senior technology leader you should start holding “brown bag” seminars at lunch once a month or other regular intervals to help train executives on technology topics important to your business. A simple topic like “Web 2.0″ or social computing could be very useful.

The geeks have the responsibility to make sure the business side is armed with BT knowledge but the business side has to do its part by understanding it’s really their own responsibility to realize their knowledge gap and seek help.

HR folks should create a technology staffing plan that would include the task of helping create interview questions and recruitment strategies to ensure you’re getting tech-savvy business folks.

What do you guys think? Am I living in a fantasy world or is the biz and tech gap really something that can be bridged?

Forrester’s healthcare and life sciences group has a new report out called The Role of the Web in Hospital Marketing. Here’s the executive summary:

Hospital marketers are waking up to the new requirements put on them by the emergence of consumer-directed health plans, the growth of health consumerism, the chronic shortage of nurses, and escalating competition among providers. These execs are moving beyond printed brochures and highway billboards and investing more heavily in their Web sites. But organizational and practical problems loom — from securing precious budget dollars to prioritizing an endless wish list of features. Forrester spoke with marketing executives at 13 US hospitals to learn about their pain points and plans for the future.

If you’re in the hospital marketing space it’s probably worth paying for but I didn’t plunk down the $775 necessary to read it. If anyone has a copy and would like to comment on it or write a guest article here about what Forrester got from their interviews of 13 hospitals that might be useful to read.

Back in February I posted about Podslurping and recommended coming up with some policies and procedures to help prevent it. This week Edward Lansink saw that original article and pointed me to his whitepaper called “Pod slurping: an easy technique for stealing data” which discusses the problem with uncontrolled use of iPods, USB sticks and flash drives on your network. Edward’s company has done a nice job capturing the problem domain (which is growing by the minute) and how to use tools like the ones his company makes to get it somewhat under control. If there’s interest I will ask him to write a guest article on the subject as well (if you’re interested in this topic let me know by clicking the rating star above).

Here’s an abstract of the product whitepaper:

A common misconception is that perimeter security measures such as firewalls and anti-virus software are enough to secure corporate data residing on the corporate network. In this white paper, we explore how the uncontrolled use of portable storage devices such as iPods, USB sticks, flash drives and PDAs, coupled with data theft techniques such as ‘pod slurping’, can lead to major security breaches.