Difficulties in Clinical Information Systems

In the past few years, Apple's product sales have become an idol and product management has become a new product.ProgramEmployeeCommunityHot topics. So I followed suit and sorted out some of my product experiences in medical informatization.

A company that previously worked in has a small scale and has no marketing department. The product manager is affiliated with the R & D department and directly reports it to the R & D manager. The product manager is responsible for R & D project management, tracking market trends and competitors, and helping the sales department to open a ticket before sales.

At that time, most of the products were successful, but there was only one product, which lasted for one or two years from concept proposal to product R & D. However, there were no customers. Later, it was proved that they had made a wrong direction and immediately cut it down, senior experts in charge of this product have found a better way to go to their future. In fact, the name of this product sounds like a mysterious, called a clinical information system.

In an industry consensus, hospital information systems can be divided into two different parts: management information systems and clinical information systems. At that time, the proposed clinical information system was actually somewhat generalized. In fact, it was mainly used for electronic medical records. Therefore, some concepts were considered very advanced, such as structured documents, clinical pathways, and clinical prompts, it was noticed very early that year. In retrospect, the reason why the boss named it a clinical information system was probably to highlight his product philosophy, that is, to improve the quality of medical care, rather than the vast majority of his systems on the market, to achieve the goal of hospital management (especially to help hospitals calculate revenue and expenditure), we will make some clinical information.

The boss has been telling us about the concept of product management for a long time. One core idea is: when talking about a product, you should not tell me about its functions first, first, tell me what the design concept is, what make it different.

Along with the concept of improving medical quality, we began to come into contact with foreigners who proposed the slogan "medical information determines medical quality" and a bunch of things called medical informatics, from basic structured input, HL7 CDA, to natural language processing, and even ontology, is a bottomless pit for small and medium-sized enterprises. The key issue is that, under the Medical Systems in China and the United States, the medical information market has always been disgusted with everything except helping to manage finance. At least that was the case at the time, and it has always been the case in the past, this may be the case now.

Therefore, sticking to the clinical information system, waiting for the medical system to return to the orthodox system, and becoming a revolutionary idealism.

The development of the medical software industry in China in the next few years also seems to prove this point. Companies that can be listed or removed from the market can either be called his, either it is a clinical information system (such as PACS) that has something to do with hardware devices and has a high degree of specialization. Other clinical information systems, such as lis, EMR, image processing, and auxiliary diagnostics, are either maintained on the Survival line, or become a line developed by his or PACs. In addition, some his companies with strong background in hospital financial management may not discuss the issue of listing, and they may not be able to spend much of their money.

In recent years, the development of some new businesses and technologies, including health records, telemedicine, and mobile healthcare, may not change this situation. The operation modes of these new businesses (such as telemedicine) are still under discussion. Most of them can only participate in project development. The opportunities for productization are not mature. Many vendors are participating and watching, what you can watch out for is other mature products and companies that can afford them. Although the business model is not yet mature, it has become a clear direction of development (such as health records), companies with a little money are scrambling to plan ahead. The emergence of new technologies (such as mobile medical care) may have a huge impact on the public health model in the public health field, but how big is the change in the clinical business in the medical industry, it is not clear now, and now in the software industry, there has been an argument that iPad is just a toy for doctors and leaders.

In addition, some people have been discussing middleware since the past few years. This has become familiar in Financial and Enterprise Informatization mature fields, and even has some outdated concepts. However, in the current medical industry, I have heard the term middleware, whether it refers to an integration platform, communication bus, business intelligence, or other things that can confuse doctors, it will make me feel a little scared (from the perspective of product management). Of course, it sounds cool for a technician who does not know about medical integration or informatization in other industries.

In fact, it is not a bad thing to do middleware. With the development of medical informatization, especially in the years when electronic medical records and health records are truly implemented, middleware will become the biggest leading role behind the scenes. However, the product operation method of middleware is completely different from that of end users. The key is to find some starting points. You can either find the starting point yourself or ask the partner to find the starting point: no starting point, middleware is nothing.

There is also an interesting thing to record to avoid forgetting. Many years ago I heard a rumor that the project development cost of the industry's information system is roughly divided into: 15% kickbacks, 15% commissions, 10% operations, 30% profits, and 30% technologies (including design, R & D, implementation, and maintenance ). In recent years, we have been immersed in technical R & D and have been isolated from each other for a long time. I don't know whether this is the case or not.