What difference does IT make?
Having worked in various IT (Information Technology) departments and roles over the years, I’ve become accustomed to the point of view that IT workers are “just” overhead. In many organizations, they are considered a cost of doing business. Often the attitude is summed up in a statement like this: “We’ve got to have email, but I’ll be darned if I know what those people do all day!”
Sometimes, it is even worse and the IT department is just seen as an obstacle to work around. As the Wall Street Journal writes: “often it’s just easier to accomplish certain tasks using consumer technology than using the sometimes clunky office technology our company gives us”.
Then there are the poorly supported in-house applications that the IT department tends to throw together. If the organization is large enough, they’ll have a dedicated support team, but, again, this is seen as a cost of doing business instead of something that adds value.
I think part of this can be understood because much of what a savvy technology worker does is completely behind the scenes. If it is done well, the end-user sees the product of the work, but not the hours put into it. The end-user has no means of understanding the work performed.
I encountered just this sort of thinking in a conversation with my brother the other night. In May, he’ll take his boards and become a certified pharmacist. In the past, he’s worked as a lab tech at the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St Louis, so he is no stranger to the value that a good IT department can add to any organization, but he was still under the impression that IT had a “neutral” economic effect.
In an attempt to illustrate just what kind of difference IT has made in the past and can make in the future, I used an example almost any American our age is familiar with: Pa Ingall’s house.
Enamored with the idea of owning his own land (and being somewhat of a loner), Pa headed west and worked and struggled to build a farm and house for his family. He worked long hours, but, at the end of the day, the best house he could build for his family still lacked some amenities like indoor plumbing and electricity that even the poorest modern day American home-owner would consider necessities today. The technology was simply not available (e.g. electricity) or was completely infeasible (e.g. indoor plumbing for prairie homes). Obviously, the creation and spread of technology has helped create a healthier and more efficient home for the modern American.
The Open Source efforts that IntraHealth’s Informatics team are pursuing could offer the same scale of benefits for health care in developing countries. As you can see from the photo to the right, many of these countries still use nineteenth century methods for organizing information about their health care workers. When there is a regional epidemic, the official in charge will have to rely on his memory or go sort through stacks of paper-based records to find the right people to send to the area.
The paper-based system lacks good reporting tools, as well. Manually compiling a list of areas with worker shortages is going to be a time-consuming, error-prone task. iHRIS puts good reporting tools at your fingertips. Reports can be created in seconds, rather than hours or days.
If iHRIS is successful to any degree, we will have a real chance of dramatically improving the health care in these countries by helping the health care workers get better access to training and by ensuring that they are deployed where they are most needed.
This, from something as mundane as providing better access to personnel records.
For someone who has been involved in IT for a few years, the chance to have this kind of impact can be intoxicating!
