The Difficult Healthcare Problems Lie at the Crossroads

Sometimes you stumble upon a quote which captures healthcare so perfectly. That’s what I felt when I heard this quote from Jonathan Sheldon at Oracle.

The real difficult problems sit at the crossroads of multiple domains – requires you to integrate data from separate domains.

-Jonathan Sheldon, Oracle

While many like to talk about the healthcare market, I’ve always felt that was a false framework. There’s no one healthcare market. At least not in the US. The world of healthcare is made up of hundreds of markets that have some overlaps and need to work together, but each market is very different. The simplest market to see is the ambulatory vs acute care vs post-acute care market. Each of these markets is so drastically different, that it’s really not useful to think of them as the same market. The same is true of specialties and even many regions.

The challenge of healthcare is that it spans all of these domains. And if you want to keep someone healthy and provide them an amazing patient experience, then you have to be able to span all of these different markets.

I guess that’s why the Jonathan Sheldon quote resonated with me so much. Healthcare faces a lot of difficult challenges, but one of the most difficult challenges is managing a patient’s care across all of these domains. All of us that have worked in healthcare have seen this first hand. It’s completely different cultures and often very different objectives.

While crossing these domains is one of the most challenging problems in healthcare, it is also some of the most rewarding.


About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

Categories