Health Care and Unified Communications

The health care industry is (perhaps unfortunately) one of the few industries still growing in these unsettled economic times.  Costs have been rising at an average rate over the past decade of close to 10% per year.  There is a great debate today about how best to control these costs, while delivering quality service and results. 

I attended the recent HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) Conference in Chicago, in part to see how unified communications concepts were becoming part of the solution.  Here are some observations.

The HIMSS conference is overwhelming, with over 25,000 attendees.  McCormick was filled with many large and multistory booths vying for attendees’ attention.  The focus of the show, of course, is IT in healthcare.  And a key theme is interoperability, including an “interoperability lab” where they showed different vendors’ gear working together.  The framework for this interconnectivity is “IHE”, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, which is creating standards for structuring electronic health information exchange.  The lab area showed about 75 vendors at pedestal-style areas, whose gear was interconnected in various combinations.  Interestingly, they have put together a series of “case studies” that describe a typical patient-care situation, and how interconnected systems would facilitate better health care.  

Beyond the lab, many of the exhibitors were demonstrating how the data in their solutions was seamlessly integrated within their own solutions, and frequently with the information of other suppliers.  What was most surprising to me, though, was the impression that there was very little unified communications focus.  In our consulting work in health care, our observation has been that many of the challenges in streamlining health care delivery relate to communications breakdowns – getting a doctor’s approval for an order, making results more readily and rapidly available, finding a resource to expedite the next step in a patient process, and many similar issues.  Improvements within hospitals, coordinating between primary and specialist physicians, and many other examples offer promises of better care and helping to control costs.

There seemed to be no sessions at the HIMSS Conference that focused on people-to-people and people-to-information communications bottlenecks and how to address them.  On the exhibit floor, virtually all the emphasis was on data exchange, such as was demonstrated in the Interoperability Lab. 

There were some exceptions.  Cisco was prominently mentioning UC functionality, and I spent some time in the Tripractix booth.  They are Cisco partner that has developed a clinical workflow tool to automate notification capabilities using a variety of communications tools based on availability of the resource and access methods that are available.  But other suppliers with well-known UC capabilities (Avaya, CosmoCom, Alcatel-Lucent, and others) were not emphasizing them. 

We believe there are excellent opportunities to build UC functionality into some of the healthcare information technology systems.  These systems consolidate and coordinate information about patient care and make it available to care providers.  But suppliers of these solutions such as McKesson, Cerner, and Epic were not showing any UC capabilities in their booths.  We know that these kinds of companies are evaluating or working on incorporating UC, but such innovation hasn’t yet made it to the show floor or into the sales staff manning the booths. 

Of course, UC isn’t going to address many of the most fundamental and pressing health care issues.  At the same time, there seems to be a surprising lack of focus on how the communications breakdowns lead to delays, quality issues, and rising costs.  There is so much attention being paid on getting the information systems to work together.  What’s missing is streamlining the person-to-person or person-to-information linkages, especially in an environment characterized by mobility, 24-hour operations, the need to coordinate a number of specialists, all coupled with important security and regulatory provisions. 

Unified communications has demonstrated its ability to help solve these kinds of issues in other business environments.  There is much work to be done in health care, and UC can help.