I have sat through my fair share of standards and governing body meetings over the last 5 years and progress is slow… and I am not sure its getting any better, Why is this the case?

The progess is slow and the outputs are lacking and the reason is a largely due to the lack of technical leadership. The old and out of fashion standards like HL7 V2 work and were created by a group of technical people who had real world implementation experience. They are lightweight and terse but actually work. Technical people brought working solutions and were grilled by other technical people and something workable emerged.

The “new” standards don’t yet work, are trying to use the latest whiz bang technology (and that keeps changing) and are created by a group of people who have no, or a very superficial technical ability and no real world experience. Its the triumph of style over substance and at some point we are going to have to pull the pin…

Technical questions are put to a “vote” when 90% of the participants don’t have a clue about what they are voting on. If 75% of the committee say 1+1 = 3 does it make it so….

Its all about trying to minimise the importance of the science and maximize the importance of politics and it will never really work, but it also fails to work in hospital management, electricity management etc etc and society seems to cling to the hope that it come right in the end. Health IT demands good science, IT is not something that can be relegated to sidelines while the administrators argue about things thay do not grasp.  IT may never be an exact science, but some things are right and others wrong and its only implementation experience that proves it in the end. Its time to lock the administrators in their office and allow the unfashionable “techos” to manage the things they understand from the inside out. The same thing needs to happen to hospital management, and I am sure it must apply in a whole range of industries.

I suspect that we will one day dig up a Roman tablet expressing these same feelings, it will predict the fall of Rome unless something changes. The internet and stockmarket bubbles have burst, its time the generic management bubble did the same.  Good managers grow up inside their industry, they come from domain experts and do not descend upon high, but emerge from the masses.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 10:29 pm and is filed under STANDARDS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.