Healthcare Matters

For you supply chain professionals out there who suffer from “collaborative fatigue,” I’ve got some bad news for you. Not only has your CEO discovered that newly defining word, but he/she has fallen for an entirely new context in which to promote it. Yes, technology continues to transform healthcare in many ways, but CEOs surveyed by IBM seemed to have fallen hard for applications that will enable doctors, nurses, payers and patients to be more communicative –and collaborative.

IBM recently surveyed about 1,700 CEOs and about 60 of them lead hospitals, insurers and other types of medical practice groups. The healthcare CEOs see the latest social media technologies as door openers for their respective organizations, providing them a path to the value being created through the new kinds of collaborative communications that they support.

As Dr. Mohammad Naraghi, an IBM Global Healthcare practice leader said, “the CEO perspective is interesting, because most outsiders don’t think of collaboration as being a key outcome to medical technology. Most of us think of laser-guided surgical instruments or designer drugs or computerized analytics as critical for spotting unnoticed disease causation chains.” In other words, most of us haven’t recognized that like-minded/interested individuals who communicate using social media are a hugely valuable information source.

CEOs recognize that social media, properly harnessed, has an investigative and forensic power that should be far more effective that the reactive alternatives. At the very least, it provides one helluva useful context. Furthermore, the same kinds of technologies when deployed on corporate intranets have the effect of making the organization more transparent for employees. Solutions that securely support and sustain such “internal social networks” are surging  in popularity for all the related and beneficial reasons. Organizational transparency of the kind that can be supported using these tools drives alignment. “It makes employees more receptive to tough changes, because they understand what’s behind the plan,” said Dr. Naraghi.

Ahead of their peers on the adoption curve, healthcare CEOs are jumping on the social media bandwagon. One U.S. healthcare CEO said that “social media and interactive Web sites will become new channel partners for communicating with our patients.” 68% of those surveyed think it will be one of the top three methods of communication within five years. “Over the same period, face-to-face contacts will fall in corresponding significance,” according to the CEOs surveyed by IBM.

It’s interesting that “unstructured information” and “social media” are currently seen as permanent bedfellows to be sorted out in big data analytical frameworks. Well, I suppose that’s fine, but parsing and indexing text, searching for patterns, etc., is genuinely not new. In fact, appropriate analytical solutions have been around for quite some time. Just ask the smartest engineer in the room. This is clearly a case where a solution has been in search of an opportunity big enough to get the attention of C-Suite –and it has.

Source: IBM Global Services and The Healthcare Blog

—Tom Finn