ITdotHealth

Dr. Herlinger is quoted in the New York Times today on the topic she so eloquently covered during her keynote talk yesterday at the Harvard Meeting on an HIT Platform.

We just wrapped up our one and a half day Harvard Meeting on a Health IT Platform. We provide a brief summary here, with more detail and video to follow.

On the first day of the meeting, we heard many of the obstacles and concerns that make data liquidity and application substitutability hard to attain. On the second day, with the keynote bookends of Professors Christensen and Herzlinger, the attendees were galvanized to consider what could be done today. Professor Christensen reminded us that disruption is a normal part of product life cycles across an industry and warned that legacy players, under threat of disruption, often seek to go to Washington to protect the viability of their enterprise. He encouraged pursuing a platform that would promote innovation. Professor Herzlinger brought into focus much of the irrationality and inefficiency that occurs when the consumer of healthcare is not the purchaser. She argued strongly in favor of personal health record platforms as one of the tools to promote information transparency and shared decision-making. Aneesh Chopra and Todd Park vividly communicated commitment to consumer engagement with health information technology.

Informative perspectives from the panels included: avoidable errors in working with monolithic IT health vendors in the United Kingdom; how substitutability can be used to improve the functionality of user interfaces; how architectural decisions can sculpt the constraints to policy and function.  We learned that ONC is planning significant support of innovation in health IT and that some vendors are opening up their product to third party developers.

Energy and willingness to act and continue the conversation was high.

Ken Mandl

Zak Kohane

The iPhone platform analogy defined by Mandl and Kohane is particularly powerful, because it is immediately clear to millions. However, it also highlights a central issue of end-user computing platforms: how does one reconcile openness and safety? I’ve just published a new knol on this topic, Open and Safe HIT Platforms. A quick excerpt:

This inherent conflict between openness and safety will inevitably play out in the health IT space, especially as the importance of Personally Controlled Health Records grows and end-users are involved in the application selection process. A key question is whether we can overcome the unproductive deadlock of extreme measures on either side: neither closed platforms that stifle innovation, nor fully anarchic platforms that provide no safety guarantees are likely the right answer.