Have you ever read something that sent chills up your spine? An old ad from Apple did it for me.
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes… While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Apple may have had the Piccassos, Einsteins, and Gandhis of the world in mind, but there are also those rare IT execs crazy enough to think they can transform the healthcare system, make it more patient-centric and cost-effective. We profiled several of these unconventional thinkers and doers last year in our 2011 CIO 25 report.
Lynn Vogel, CIO of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center comes to mind. Rather than sign on with one of the major commercial EHR system vendors such as Epic or Cerner, he chose to develop a one-of-a-kind patient records system from the ground up. Most commercial vendors are focused on either routine hospital or physician care, Vogel says, and don’t incorporate the latest clinical research data into patients’ records.
In cancer care, that routine just doesn’t work, Vogel says. “It used to be a university would do the research. Five, six, seven or eight years later, it would show up in some clinical practice,” he says. “We want to shorten that. When people have cancer, they don’t want to wait four or five years.” They want to learn about new research right away, so they can enroll in clinical trials. “That’s what drove us,” Vogel says about the center’s work to incorporate research into clinical processes faster.
In a recent phone interview, he said the center’s plan in the next few years is to do gene sequencing on every one of the patients at MD Anderson. Such massive amounts of individualized molecular data require a huge data repository. And it also requires a system that lets clinicians see that data at the point of care.
via Healthcare IT Needs More Crazy CIOs – Healthcare – Leadership – Informationweek.