Any fool Can Make a Rule

Today, March 13, 2012, while traveling on an American Airlines flight I happened to read an article introducing the great virtues of EHRs (Electronic Health records) in their recent flight magazine. However, just two nights ago I had published that EHR’s are now becoming the dinosaurs of the medical digital experience and for companies to invest into the newer options. The article ‘Portal of Good Health’ page 34 of their March 01, 2012 issue quotes customers, experts and instances with statements like ‘..are spreading with lightning speed with patent portals to support EHR’s being close behind.
So who are these articles actually targeted to? Is it the casual reader who has no interest in either healthcare or EHR’s? Is it  the legacy, and hard copy background,  hospital executives who are disconnected with the digital landscape in their industry, but still carry enough clout to take a technocratic decision that seems to come from the recesses of their thought process? Or maybe it is the EHR marketing folks attempting to extract the last benefit from a dying horse by marketing its past glory. The main problem with EHR is that it mainly consists of digital scans that are impervious to content intelligence. They are stored in silos of information and have no relational harmonization, i.e. connections between all facets of a patent need including history, doctor reports, medicines, location of emergency equipment, contra-indications of medications, all instantly accessible on a portable device like an iPad and a semantic layer of total connectivity.  EHR is a dinosaur and is being proactively replaced by big-data engines that allow all the above features and more.

I also recall a few years ago, sometime in early 2010, and being from California, reading another article somewhere that was promoting the virtues of buying in Modesto right then. It stated that Modesto was possibly the greatest hidden investment in all  US of A. From personal experience, i.e. I had a family friend who had heavily invested into properties in Modesto the reality was exactly the opposite. $650k homes were selling for $250k. If someone had invested at that point of time they would today be 13% under. However, the article talked of glorious sunken gardens and carried beautiful photographs and recommended 'Right Now' was the opportune moment to shift to this fast growing city, when in reality folks were going belly-up and underwater and leaving the city faster than you can read this article. My friend sold all his properties at a loss and got out of the property business altogether.

On saturday night while playing poker with a friend, my wife had made a statement that if a company needs to advertise their product it is probably either not too good, or in a mode of decline, and I had disagreed with her.

In that one instant sitting on the seat of an airplane all of these things converged into a single point of ‘Any fool can make a rule’ and if that rule has enough money behind it then it can be made pretty convincing, and if there are enough legacy decision makers then an alternate reality is created. A reality of perceived by unrealizable success.

Unfortunately all of these statements are also best practice and value statements. Best practice and value for the EHR and Modesto folks with total disregard for the customer or investor.  Best practice because the management of the EHR/Modesto has a mandatory mandate to squeeze every last ounce of potential from their products or assets, and value for each time they can sell a dying horse they get exceptional value. Every corporate mandate is to make profits for the company and its investors. Quality and true business satisfaction are somewhere behind the mists of marketing and selling. True quality has to be measured by business-value-attainment rules, without which one might only invest into one of the following, the first being a higher than 50% probability of failure, and the second being contributing into the values of our partners and advisors.