Marlene Sánchez IT Architect
October, 2012
Key contributions regarding digital transformation could be analyzed in Mexican Healthcare industry, which has not been disrupted by Internet given the mandatory personal attention provided by physicians and the levels of poverty in the country. Mexican patients know that in order to have proper medical attention they have to 1) pick-up the phone and schedule a monthly/weekly or yearly appointment with the physician 2) Go the appointment and be examined 3) Buy the recommended prescription or make some extra medical studies and 4) Continue with the treatment. Now, picture the following scenario:
One patient has 62 years old and began to experience symptoms of a neurological disease that must be treated by more than one specialist in less than 24 hours to avoid complications, however no medical institution or private physician is able to share the patient medical record electronically to reference the patient urgently, which of course delay the diagnosis. What is the result? The patient finished with several complications that will jeopardize her/his quality of life for the next years. So, after this analysis I begin to ask myself how IT could transform the end of this story and what implications this transformation could bring to the Healthcare Industry. Responding to those questions is the purpose of the following document.
Healthcare industry in Mexico is composed of the following roles in the supply chains: Physicians, Patients, Medical institutions (e.g private or public hospitals), pharmacies and laboratories. Some physicians have paid for customized software to manage patient records however the small ones still managing their information in paper. Now, some medical institutions have implemented successfully Electronic Medical Record (EMR)1 systems, nevertheless physicians are not able to connect to those systems. So based on those facts, I affirm that a digital transformation in Mexican Health care industry requires standardization of information to ease interoperability among systems and to be able to open new ways of operation. In this regard I picture the development of an open standardized IT platform that will emerge as a disruptive change offering benefits to patients and physicians2 and that after some time it will be considered an open standard due to network externalities to the entire supply chain. In this regard, IT can ease prescriptions generations, medical schedules and referrals, communications among physicians and the supply of drugs.
Lead physicians that adopt this platform will be able to offer extra services to their patients like: online appointment, e-prescription, and e-referral that can diminish the overall process time. When the network begins to grow physicians will be able to reference patients to different doctors and they all will be beneficed by scale economies. In this regard, other physicians will be obligated to adopt the platform to remain competitive while medical institutions and pharmacies will be motivated to join the network. The mentioned IT platform will allow discovering of new business opportunities in the Health care Industry, for instance, doctors will be able to share prescription information to pharmacies which could improve the forecast of drug demand.
Furthermore, Health care industry could suffer a change in its structure using an IT platform since laboratories could reach patients directly to market new drugs based on their record history and doctors could analyze patient information and offer discounts in order to promote preventive and regular checks. Furthermore, pharmacies role could change since those firms won´t need to review and validate the eprescription, allowing these entities to focus more on CRM initiatives. On the other hand, an IT platform can impact considerably the medical business structure, given that centralization of information (EMR) can ease decentralizing of diagnosis process. For instance, physicians located in different geographic locations could be working on the same case in order to deliver a more accurate diagnosis to the patient. It is important to mention, that the introduction of a new platform could generate rejection among the supply chain parties and within the industry given that the new technology doesn´t necessarily offer all functionality that some of them use to manage. However, users and the marketplace must be convinced to accept the change with the equally dramatic new benefits3.
Now so far, I have exposed the value of IT through the innovations of processes and business models in the Health care Industry in order to improve customer service; however it will be wise to talk about the competitive advantage of this transformation and what factors should decision makers take into account in their business strategies. And in this regard, I must say that decision makers in this industry must be aware that new sustainable and disruptive technologies can show up and new medical standards could emerge, and that even with all those changes they have to promote sustained initiatives to continue innovating business practices4 in order to remain competitive. Moreover, I advise physicians to spend in IT platforms that differentiate them from other practitioners and that allow them to offer better service to their patients; all roles in the supply chain should treat IT as an opportunity to define and deploy new ways of working5.
In conclusion, if a platform like this could exist, many users could be more pleased with the medical service and more business opportunities could be discovered within the Health care industry.
References
[1] Ximena Cassab,“La digitalización de expedientes revitalizaría el sector salud en México”, CNN Mexico, January 2012, downloadedfrom http://mexico.cnn.com/salud/2012/01/24/la-digitalizacion-deexpedientes-revitalizaria-el-sector-salud-en-mexico
[2] Clayton Christensen, “How can we beat our most powerful competitors”, HBS Press Chapter, 2003.
[3] Geoffrey Moore, “Crossing the Chasm and Beyond”, HarperBusiness, 2002.
[4] John Seely Brown, John Hagel III, “Does IT Matter? An HBR Debate”, Harvard Business Review, May 2003.
[5] Andrew Mcafee and Erik Brynjolfsson,”Dog Eat Dog”,The Wall Street Journal, April 2007.
Healthcare in Mexico is complex. In 2010 government decided to built an interoperability platform to share medical records nation-wide. Normativity is in the table (NOM024) but large public institutions was not ready with standard-based EHR. In my personal opinion project collapsed! Since 2002 I've seen too much efforts on the system to 'jump' to HIT, I was part of this effort, promoting usage of digitized images, web distribution of these images for reference sharing, HIT solutions to improve patient care & hospital operations. I still see too much home-made systems, trying to solve EHR needs but so far for being standard-based and ready to share information.
ReplyDeleteYes, HIT can change industry in Mexico. Just imagine a closer case to our reality... Diabetic patient, 62 years old. Patient travels, eats typical food in a nice typical restaurant, gets stomach sick because a simple infection. Then after dehydrated symptoms, doctor prescription is glucose serum. Patient did not advice the diabetes disease and doctor did not ask. The patient did not survive to the 'normal' stomach disease procedure.
HIT save lifes... Definitely!
Hi Marco. Completely agree with you. Standardization is a huge challenge for public institutions due to political and organizational barries. In this regard, I picture that the effort could be started from the private sector which has more opportunity to embrace the change as a consequence promote scale economies.
ReplyDeleteThank you again for your opinion. :)