The following contains the contents of my talk to the Association of Information Technology Professionals, Long Island Chapter, Healthcare Special Interest Group delivered on October 26, 2010.
The topic was Vendor Support of Healthcare IT, and the comment I heard most often about the presentation was that they had never thought about Vendor Support in this manner before.
My audience was a mixture of healthcare industry personnel, IT personnel from hardware, software, and integration companies, and academics. I was asked there because of my experience in working with nursing homes and doctor’s offices developing RFID solutions and providing technical support services.
We have three very general classes of Healthcare IT “users” here today: Vendors, Consumers, and Academics. I will address primarily the first two through out this talk.
Let’s start with the following statement,
“No matter how sophisticated the technology, it still takes people!”
Does anyone recognize this statement? Good. I’m happy to see that at least one person recognizes that it is the trademarked tag line of the AITP. So why is this the tagline? What does it really mean?
- Technology will always require people to develop, run, service, and of all things, USE it. The purpose of technology is to solve a need or want of people.
- It should do this effectively.
- It should do this efficiently.
- What defines effective and efficient may not be the same across disparate lines of separation, whether it be industry, generation, socio-economic class, company, or even Healthcare IT vendor or consumer. Each of these may have fundamentally different values.
- So how do we address the subjective value decision of what is an effective and efficient solution. This is important, because what may be effective may not always be desired, and the same is true of what is most efficient.
- The fundamental issue I just identified about different underlying values is the mitigating factor driving this conflict.
- This gets further complicated when we introduce the concept of intrinsic hypocrisy with a given set of values, which recognizes that at some point two values can come into conflict with each other, and the individual must choose to sacrifice one of those over the other. One group may make one choice, and another group may make a different choice. Same values, different governing choices. This can also happen within the same group where differing choices are made due to different controlling circumstances.
- So values pose a problem for us in general, right? Yes and no. Understanding fundamental values is important for a vendor, so that they can better serve their client, and for the client, so that they will get better service from their vendor if they understand and can communicate their fundamental values.
- Let’s go back to where we started–technology is there to serve people by solving a problem effectively and efficiently, but the problem is that these two targets are movable by anyone under any set of conditions. In fact most businesses do not know their fundamental values. I would like to confess, and this applies not only in the business arena, that I find most people do not understand what they truly value.
- So, as vendors, we need to identify what our clients truly value so that we can address their needs appropriately. The vendor who can do this continually will have a client for life. The client will feel like their vendor can think for them, and that is because they can. As clients, we need to identify what we truly value from both our vendors and the technological solutions to which we look to them so that we can describe our needs.
Needs. Wants. Values. Desires. Requirements. Specifications.
Now, let’s introduce the concept of the Needs-Wants Continuum
cont.
