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This is in response to Dave Shaver’s (President of Corepoint Health) comment on my blog.
Hi David,
Thanks for weighing in. Your comment reminds me of one of the earliest conversations we had where you made much the same point: That it’s not the best technology that wins, but the best marketed one. It was an argument that made a lot of sense at the time – Microsoft seemed almighty and it looked like Windows was going to be dominant forever.
Back in the early 2000′s the winners in the technology space were the guys that accepted less than perfection in their products and sold the heck out of them. Unfortunately, in healthcare IT this model continues to be executed all too often. The end is result is a lot of enterprise health IT systems that just don’t deliver the value that they ought to.
I think that an inordinate amount of interoperability problems originate from the lack of high quality products used throughout the healthcare industry.
As leaders of technology organizations in North America, we need to set the bar much higher. If we don’t show that type of leadership, and we create weak organizations that do not have first class products, we open our collective economic eco-system to weakness and fragility. Those weakness lead directly to the misery and distress that ordinary people face in cities like Detroit, Michigan.
We need to show greater social responsibility by being uncompromising in the pursuit of excellence.
Fortunately, we live in a time when we do have role models for leaders that have shown that if you focus on excellence and the customer experience that you can be very successful. One of the role models I aspire to is Steve Jobs. He was a very divisive figure – but no one can deny that he had a profound impact how we see computing today.
Steve Jobs was way ahead of curve in understanding just what a pile of technical debt Adobe Flash was. His competitors made a big noise about it and how much better their platforms were for supporting Flash. But at the end of day Steve Jobs showed he got it. He wasn’t someone that was afraid to put his stake in the ground and say what he believed in. He wasn’t a ‘me too’ leader.
At the end of day – he was right.
Steve Jobs killed Flash on the mobile platform.
We need more leaders like Steve Jobs.
I am comfortable with having a different focus. I do not feel the need to wrap myself in the flag of standards. Nor do I need to wax lyrical about consensus. I want to do what is right for healthcare and do my part to deliver value and help fix the big problems we see. I will do what I feel needs to done and am not afraid to take unconventional paths to get there.
Having said all that – thanks for the beer on Tuesday night – it was great (although I did feel it the next morning – ugh!)
I’m off to Europe tomorrow for two and half weeks holiday so don’t expect to hear much from me – enjoy the summer, it looks like it’s going to be a great one.
Au revoir!
Now that we’re back from HIMSS and life is returning to normal, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who stopped by our booth. Whether you were there to explore 
