Welcome to my online (HI Conversation) lunch seminar tomorrow Thursday June 13, 12.00-13.00 Central European Summer Time (CEST), titled “Please stop buying yesterday’s ‘all inclusive’ Health IT-systems!”. Free registration is needed to get the Zoom link from Karolinska Institutet
Swedish regions have bought “new” monolithic Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems to replace their even older monolithic EHR systems. Experiences indicate that such transition processes are painful. This short talk highlights some of the well-known root causes of integration problems and the common strategies available to handle them. Buying a monolithic EHR is just one of the strategies, and nowadays usually not the best strategy at the complexity level of a big Swedish healthcare region. The Spanish region Catalonia and many others (including in Scandinavia) are instead going for a more open platform approach using vendor-neutral standards like openEHR and FHIR and avoid monolithic EHR systems. Karolinska University Hospital has started using such a platform approach internally and hope to extend the usage to others.
The transition to a monolith EHR usually uses up resources and stalls most other development during years. An “all-inclusive effect” often starts already when buying a monolith is considered, and then continues during the lifetime of the contract. The “all-inclusive effect” is a combination of economic lock-in, transition fatigue and integration difficulties. It is often expressed in terms like “Yes the monolith does not support your clinical IT-need X very well yet, but the system supplier has promised to improve, please don’t suggest/consider any objectively better competing solution. We are already bound in a 12-year contract paying for the monolith’s (possibly inferior) functionality covering need X. Also it was a pain to do the transition and integrations so we won’t have energy and resources even if the competing solution would be free or cheap.”
Time for questions and discussion is planned toward the end of the seminar.
Info page at Karolinska Institutet: HI Conversations - Please stop buying yesterday’s 'all inclusive' Health IT-systems! | Karolinska Institutet
Free registration to get zoom link: https://ki.se/en/lime/register-to-the-hi-conversations-seminar-series
Linkedin post: Erik Sundvall on LinkedIn: HI Conversations - Please stop buying yesterday’s 'all inclusive' Health…
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