This may seem incredibly obvious, but the IT world and its effects on your business have changed significantly since the IBM PC came out 30 years ago.
The sickly green monochrome monitor with a Lotus 123 spreadsheet image burnt into the screen sounds like an urban legend to Generation Net. If you tell early PC stories to 20-somethings, they look at you like you must have been pelted by Angry Birds.
But while in the midst of change, it’s sometimes difficult to see the potential impact. So as someone who has gone through the industry’s evolution, I can appreciate what it took to go from a sewing-machine-size “portable” PC to a smartphone with broadband Wi-Fi.
Consider Michael Dell. In 1984, Dell was building PCs in his dorm room. Eight years later, at age 27, he became the youngest CEO to have his company ranked in the Fortune 500. Now he has the experience to look at the big picture and perceive how things are changing. “Look at the example of a large hospital. What they really don’t need is IT,” he said in a recent eWeek interview. “What they want are better outcomes for their patients.”
The same holds true for our businesses. We no longer just need the next generation of hardware and latest software. We need tools and processes to mine relevant data from the terabytes of information we accumulate; we need to mobilize our content, products and services; and we need to use these advances to focus our businesses on customer satisfaction and growing our bottom line.
Just like Dell, we can look to the health care industry for a strategy. And there’s no better place to learn from the docs than Cleveland.
That’s why one of the annual highlights of the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit is the Top 10 Medical Innovations list. Each year, after a rigorous nomination and evaluation process, Dr. Michael Roizen and a panel of expert Clinic docs explain the selections for life-changing drugs, devices or procedures.
Surprisingly, this year only one pick was a drug, but several had to do with IT. Mixed in with novel diabetes therapy (No. 9) and early lung cancer detection (No. 2) was harnessing big data to improve health care at No. 8. An estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced daily and 90 percent of the data in the world has been created in the past two years. (I think most of it ends up in my inbox.)
Data alone (whether medical records or your company’s sales logs) is worthless. It needs to be in a useful format and aggregated and analyzed to turn it into something valuable.
How do you turn a quintillion bytes of data into the useful nuggets that you need? Elementary, my dear Watson — the IBM artificial intelligence computer system and Jeopardy! champ.
Named for IBM’s first president, Watson took on two teams of Cleveland Clinic doctors at the Summit and kept its winning streak alive. Watson’s powerful hardware, natural language processes and huge database aren’t commercially available yet, but what could you do with a device that can process about 500 gigabytes (about a million books) per second? Sure, it sounds like science fiction, but so did smart phones a few decades ago.
The No. 4 innovation, medical apps for mobile devices, is a result of the revolution that has brought connected technology to consumer devices. The mobile health, or mHealth, platform allows both physicians and patients to have fingertip access to reliable health care information.
Increasingly, mobile devices are used for patient-to-physician communication, including a simple pain application that allows patients to touch a frowning or smiling face on their mobile device, note the duration and location, and instantly share the data with their physician.
Of course, there are concerns. For example, paper records don’t experience downtime. “Connectivity makes or breaks a deal,” said Summa Health Systems CIO Greg Kall at the NEOSA CIO Symposium. You must decide what level of potential downtime is acceptable.
Are there other opportunities for your business to take advantage of the mobile revolution? Even for low-tech businesses, the infrastructure is available. QR codes, for example, those squiggly boxes popping up everywhere, are easy to create and can be scanned by mobile devices to take the user to a Web page, add vCard info or provide a relatively large amount of whatever information you choose. Including QR codes on your marketing material, business cards or even storefront steers people to your message.
The health care industry is clearly asking, “How is the practice of medicine changing?”
At its most basic level, the office visit, the delivery of health care is shifting, according to C. Martin Harris, CIO of the Cleveland Clinic. During a One Community Summit, he noted that in a quality of diabetes care study, patients received much better care and actual outcomes when doctors used electronic medical records technology rather than paper records.
At an organizational level, a platform such as Microsoft Health Vault, which stores health information from many sources in one online location so that it’s always organized and available, is allowing the Clinic to “get out of the plumbing business,” Harris says. Handling 100 million people’s data is not unusual for Microsoft’s infrastructure but would be an expensive resource hog for the Clinic.
Our current tech climate has the most potential and opportunity since before the 2000 tech bubble burst. Smart devices, mobile apps and Cloud coverage are game changers. It’s time to rethink your business to take advantage of them. Doctor’s orders.
Dan Hanson (dan@greatlakesgeek.com) is aware that the Information Revolution is over. Information won.