El Camino Hospital bills itself as “The Hospital of Silicon Valley.” That’s a tall order. It implies cutting-edge technology, innovative thinking and risk-taking. The hospital’s storied leadership in information technology testifies to those attributes. Indeed, the hospital has an IT pedigree.
In 1971, working with Lockheed Martin, a leader in Space Age technology, the hospital brought computing to the provision of care. Employing a “big iron” mainframe system of the day, the hospital launched the world’s first clinical information system. El Camino’s move heralded the beginning of health care’s slow crawl toward integrated clinical computing, whether or not the rest of health care knew it.
In the 1970s, we thought that the application of technology would solve our problems just like it solved President Kennedy’s national challenge to put a man on the moon. A common expression of frustration about small daily annoyances and the failure of business or government to solve a particular problem began like this: “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we.…”
Like everything else from the 1970s, Space Age thinking has become retro. Today, people are both amazed by the acceleration of technological change and numbed to its transformative power. At the same time, we have learned a healthy skepticism about technology.
There are downsides to technology. Ubiquitous communication and personal computing have made virtually every location an office away from the office. E-mail floods our lives. Some goofball with a camera phone can post a film of you riding the bus on YouTube in seconds.
More importantly, we have learned that building and using technology isn’t enough to make positive improvements in clinical care. In fact, the technology is just a tool, sometimes acting like a jeweler’s pliers, sometimes acting like a buzz saw. It’s the application of information generated by IT—and the process improvements made possible by it—that drives effective, efficient, sustainable change.
This article first appeared in the Fall issue of HHN's Most Wired Magazine.
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