Health IT and clinical research

I recently returned from the E-Health Canada conference in Vancouver. I was there as an analyst for Info-Tech research group. I spoke about secure use of consumer devices in healthcare and the potential of cloud computing as a flexible model to deal with CoIT.


I was pleasantly surprised by the IT knowledge level of the nurses and doctors that attended the conference. Why was I surprised in this age of consumer devices and self service tech? Well I spend a fair amount of my time talking to and about IT departments. The impression that I get from many of them is that while most people can set up their email on their phone they remain largely clueless about the actual tech itself.  


Well, there is certainly a core of nurses and doctors that understand the tech and have really great ideas for how to make it work better in the context of healthcare delivery. I was left with the feeling that many remain frustrated with the current solutions and the pace that E-health is moving forward. The major areas of frustration were around content delivery and system upgrade for usability. I would summarize it as “You must do something; protect the data but be flexible on the device used”. Technology should allow doctors to spend more time looking and talking to patients not with their nose buried in a tablet. Just placing a tablet in the doctors’ hands doesn’t mean it will lead to increased use of the IT solutions for healthcare.


While some may point to this as a technology problem, it was clear from talking to the vendors that the solutions available today can meet the demands that hospitals are placing on IT. As someone with a past on the research and has dabbled in clinical research it was refreshing to know that there is a variety of solutions out there to make clinical research easier. What was interesting was how similar healthIT problems are to many other industries. In my opinion the issue is now about getting the best out of the tech not when will the tech exist.


 In other words its about getting the users and the admins on the same page. 


As someone with a deep passion about Rare diseases and use of high level biomedical research its somewhat frustrating that the system that is in use today is so antiquated. The upgrades available today could add so much intelligence to how we treat Rare diseases in particular. 


The new areas of stem cell therapy and epigenetics hold a HUGE promise if we can understand the relationship between disease and biology in these patients. Since they are so rare at any given location it is imperative that we have a way to share the data that is safe enough to share patient history across borders.