When the Mouse Roared at the Lion (in a Hospital)

I saw a company recently who provides tele sitting solutions for hospitals suggest their customers trade in their old hardware and software for credits on the new version. I thought I was in a time machine back to the 90s — imagine trading in your mission critical business solution like you would a used car.

I’ve learned so much from so many gracious nurses, doctors and therapists about care and the solutions needed to deliver — far beyond what I appreciated even after spending 1000 hours watching how care is delivered in the hospital. I respect what their experience offers.

In the same way, I feel like most of the hospital related technology industry does not appreciate the implications of cloud computing on the innovation rates of their providers. Lessons I was fortunate enough to be a part of at Appirio and through our partners. When Salesforce and Workday were 1/100th the size of siebel and peoplesoft it was already clear it was too late for those legacy vendors to keep up with the new rate of innovation. Once the threshold of being viable for some enterprise customers was breached, their fate was sealed. No amount of capital or customer advantage could hold back the tidal wave of new innovation that created new value for the end customer. Cloud vendors were in cars while the legacy vendors tried to keep up with a horse and buggy.

The EMR is not a counter example to this narrative, it is a reflection that the activation function of viability for that one category is insanely high and difficult to cross. Moreover, it doesn’t apply to adjacent innovations in specialities like radiology or emerging solutions in inpatient telemedicine.

Your clinical partners are not expected to understand all of this, but hospital CIOs better. Infrastructure investments in dead ends make for short careers. I saw first hand in the early days how CIOs that picked Siebel over salesforce seldom lasted long enough to be the ones that fixed the mistake in later years.

Risk is a powerful word and driver in decision making. At inflections points, what is real vs perceived risk is often misaligned. For too long hospitals felt immune from this change — the whiplash of covid and the subsequent financial, staffing and care pressures are changing all of that — forever. Those who can escape #wysiati have a chance to create category defining paradigms of patient care and hospital management that endure for decades to come.

If you’re a hospital CEO, it’s crucial that you ensure the teams driving technology in your hospital are not constrainted by WYSIATI.

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