Several months ago, I got a call for a director of IT.  The hospital was looking for someone to lead implementation of one of the healthcare software ( I do not want to disclose names here).   Job description was pretty much IT and informatics related.

And  I had several very good well regarded names to fill this role – mind you I am not in recruiting business.  But, then the hospital insisted that the person must be an MD with license to practice.

Now that did not make sense.  MDs are trained to MD, not a business process manager or project manager or for that matter IT manager.  secondly, it is an absolute waste of well trained resource.

Then I started thinking a bit more and it was not secret or great finding that significant amount of hospitals have leadership roles filled by physicians and nurses.  That is a bit odd.   I do not see why a surgeon should be running an IT department?

I also recall, and the video is posted here at THT, about a healthcare debate hosted by CNBC where Senator Bill Frist made comment that our healthcare system is still in 2o th century.  Rest of the world has moved forward, but healthcare has stayed behind.

Current state of affair in healthcare is that most of the hospitals run on very thin margin and inspite of the effort of over a decade, the number of avoidable injuries and deaths have remained pretty much the same.

This, then begs the question as to what need to change.  Keep on doing the same thing and expect different result is a definition of insanity.   We need to change to sane behavior.

What healthcare facilities need to do is bring in innovation, out of box thinking, and even more importantly; inplace of being adamant about medicocratic system, they should do benchamrking and lessons learned from other non-healthcare companies for best-in-class process, methods, and tools.

There is plenty of things to be learned from manufacturing and engineering world.

Hope we heed to the need of time.  In the current global market, change is required to stay ahead.  Less than that, it is a question of time when stubbornness will lead to demise.