Managed health care congress is IT’s place to be
Internet agenda advancing at warp speed,’ say speakers
By DON LONG
Healthcare InfoTech Managing Editor
ATLANTA Healthcare is changing, not just fast, but at "warp speed," according to a brochure provided by one exhibitor at this year’s National Managed Health Care Congress (NMHCC; Waltham, MA) gathering, held here this week. That change is being both fostered and complicated by the Internet, the topic of the speaker track generically titled, "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Internet but Were Afraid to Ask."
During the session, it was clear that the speakers felt they were talking to neo-users of the net. But their remarks clearly showed what agenda the IT industry is setting for managed care or, put another way, the agenda these experts feel managed care should be setting for itself as it eyes the IT future.
Launching the discussion was Bill Young, vice president of SASH Communications (Sunnyvale, CA), who told the audience that the Internet "will bring as much value to your organization in the next five years as the computer has in the last 29 years."
Daniel Proctor, chief technology officer for Passport Health Communications (Brentwood, TN), offered "three important points, concepts that are not necessarily shared by everyone" about the Internet.
He pointed to surveys indicating that the 140 million users currently on the Internet would expand to 250 million by 2002 and that their major use of the Internet is to seek out "medical content." Looking at another consumer group, Proctor said recent data show that by this spring, 64% of the physicians worldwide would be online.
This observation prefaced his first point: "The Internet is about power shift, we believe, from the supplier to the consumer. We believe that the consumer and the physician are going to begin pulling healthcare into the Internet marketplace. There’s going to be a major shift in power to the patient and physician as a group."
Proctor next cited a prediction about the Internet that he felt would turn out to be wrong "that the industry was going to get rid of the middleman. I don’t believe that’s correct. If anything, the Internet makes the role of the middleman more important," he said, making his second key point. Like other speakers throughout the conference, he offered Amazon.com as an example of a company that had maximized its middle position in e-commerce.
"There is a real role and a need for a middleware type of solution and a middleware type of company," Proctor said.
Addressing a third key issue, that of security, he said that the Internet’s biggest security problem was a perception that the Internet is not secure. "That’s been good, because we’ve worked so hard in the business that we’ve come up with tools that allow you to use the Internet, I believe, in a more secure way than non-Internet.
"The Internet is being seen as more secure than the non-Internet," Proctor said. "The next question then is, do we make the same requirements for non-Internet traffic as we do on Internet traffic? Ninety-nine percent of EDI traffic is sent over non-Internet lines. All of that traffic is in the clear, non-encrypted. Do we require the same levels of security on non-Internet traffic as Internet traffic? I don’t believe we can demand the same requirements. It would bring the EDI business to its knees."
Dan Emig, technology marketing manager for SMS (Malvern, PA), encouraged the audience to become familiar with HCFA security guidelines, especially since failure to satisfy those guidelines could lead to maximum penalties of $250,000 and even imprisonment.
For Emick, the "nut" of Internet expansion is e-commerce, "leading to, over the next three years, a nine-times [expansion] in the amount of e-commerce out there."
Emick emphasized that the Internet now operates on a different time line than previous technologies, using "dog years" as a comparison. "For telephone networks, it took about 38 years to accumulate 50 million users. On the Internet, it’s a six-month pace to accumulate that many users.
"If you wait six months to adopt this new technology, you’re going to fall significantly behind your competition. If you fall two years behind, the game’s over. That’s equivalent to a decade in technology transition."
As technology gets cheaper, this creates a dilemma for many companies, Emick said. "You have to balance How fast do I go?’ with When do I deploy the stuff?’ It’s always a balance of I gotta get there fast’ against the amount of the investment."
One of the key trends that healthcare is adopting, he said, "is ubiquitous computing," in particular devices that doctors can quickly use perhaps via touch screen to get on the Internet quickly and easily, "without all that stuff on the hard drive."
Like many speakers at the conference, Emick noted the increasing problem of IT staff shortages, fueled in part by low pay scales in the healthcare industry. "The deck is stacked against you to retain IT talent." To solve this problem, he said companies are going to have to leverage their capabilities through partnerships and networks.
"Who do you partner with to get ahead in this area? What networks are you going to hook up to?"
"The final piece to the access presence and application strategy is to take existing applications and make them available over the Internet," Emick said. "That’s a twofold piece. Use the public Internet as a network mechanism to get to the to access to the information. Secondly, give a new front end to those applications."
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