The "first paperless hospital" was supposed to change everything, but it went bust in mere months. What can healthcare learn from this story?
Image courtesy of Nick van Terheyden, plucked from a Health Care International brochure.
In 1994, what was supposed to be a game-changing hospital opened just outside of Glasgow, Scotland. It was called Health Care International, and it was touted as the “first paperless hospital.” But less than half a year later, it was in financial ruin and on the auction block.
Today on Data Book, we tell the story of Health Care International, or HCI, and its forward-thinking technological approach. What produced the problems that plagued this progressive project? And what can contemporary healthcare, on its path toward digitization and data dominance, learn from this nearly 30-year-old story?
To help answer these questions, we welcome Nick van Terheyden, MD, the key opinion leader who founded and runs Incremental Healthcare, a company that focuses on small, below-the-radar changes. He also served as the chief medical officer of Dell. But before any of that, van Terheyden helped design HCI and its novel data- and tech-driven infrastructure. He discusses the hospital, what it lent to healthcare as a whole, and the bigger issues facing health tech, namely the use and improvement of electronic medical records.
To close out this episode of Data Book, we bring on Shereese Maynard, MBA. Another leader in the space (and on Twitter), she is a healthcare policy, interoperability, and blockchain expert who is the managing director of Envision Care. (She’s also a contributing writer for Healthcare Analytics News™.) She discusses the prevalence of paper in healthcare organizations and where the industry must go if it is to leverage this powerful technology.
So, tune in and sink into the story of the high-tech hospital the world wasn’t ready for.
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