By KEITH W. BOONE

All too often I’ve heard the comparison between the financial industry and its efforts to make transactions electronic, and the healthcare industry.  But health is not something that I can make deposits on and withdraw later.  We aren’t talking about a case where there are only two organizations completing business transactions on behalf of their customers.

There’s a lot more going on here.  A better comparison would be to automation supporting electronic commerce between multiple businesses.  I’ll use electronic publishing as an example, since I have some history in that space.

Imagine that you had a customer needing a new web page.  You have to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish, and then design a page to meet their needs. Along the way, you have to obtain assets:  Text content, media (pictures or video), put it together, get approvals, and publish the content.  Obtaining the assets might involve negotiating access to content from others, paying someone to provide it, or simply assigning the job of creating it to someone on your staff.  Afterwards, you need to put all those pieces together into a coherent whole, possibly get someone to review and approve it, and then it gets pushed out to the web.  Anywhere along the way you may learn that there are other tasks to perform.  Some of the content may need to be coded in Flash, in which case, you might need to put a flash player download button on the site (which means you need another piece of content), et cetera. Oh, and if you are providing full service, you might also evaluate how people respond to the page, and make any adjustments necessary to improve their response.  Now, consider making that whole process electronic, and you begin to understand the complexity of healthcare. BTW:  There are systems that support this process electronically, but they are proprietary.Continue reading…