Can Healthcare IT leapfrog Financial Services with Web 3.0
I ‘m having a De Ja Vu 10 Years ago, people used to ask me why the consumer IT was almost 10 years behind Enterprise IT. Today, it is actually 10 years ahead. Now, people ask me “Why is Healthcare IT almost 10 years behind Financial Services IT?” Surprisingly the answer is almost the same. IT processes traditionally evolved around structured data and structured processes. Business users were trained on these apps to do their repeatable day-to-day job. On the other hand, the consumers who were more used to unstructured and diverse collaboration profiles were left far behind. In 2000, while most business users had email and used computers to do their day-to-day transactions, only few consumers participated in either email or transactions on the web. Evolution of Web 2.0 This brought unstructured social media collaboration through scalable cloud computing and mobile delivery channel and leap frogged the consumer world far above the average knowledge worker within the enterprise. Typical day in a Healthcare enterprise Unlike Banking, Healthcare deals with massive amounts of unstructured data and unstructured collaboration. When a patient walks in to the doctor’s clinic, they fill out several pages of paper describing their issue, their symptom and their patient history. The nurse takes additional notes while collecting general health information and the doctors add even more based on their observation. Processing of payment results in even more paperwork through the claim lifecycle. By the time it is all done, a single episode may result in 20-30 pages of content! The entire episode can span weeks and months involving dynamic collaboration between doctors, nurses, pharmacies, labs and insurance companies.
Making way for the best of both
What if we could figure out a way to effectively handle both structured and unstructured data? What if the web could offer personalization and user experience of the social media and add intelligence & meaningful analytics in the enterprise context?
That’s what Web 3.0 is all about
Given its requirements, Healthcare is the perfect test-bed for Web 3.0 and don’t be surprised if in the next 5 years it leap-frogs other verticals with the technology that it always deserved.