Focus

This is just a brief observation …

It seems that there are so many great apps/software/devices coming out in the medical field.

All of them offer some sort of connectivity or paradigm shift in the way things have traditionally been done. The main trend, is that everyone is very focused … they focus on one or two key things and attempt to do those things to the best of their abilities.

While this is great, the biggest challenge moving forward for any large scale hospital IT department is going to be figuring out how all these separate parts can be combined, especially since no one single solution does everything well.

Is it acceptable to have 8 different applications do 8 different things, which leads to 8 different databases storing information on one person?

Is it up to the app/software/device vendors to create an all encompassing solution or is it up to the departments to figure out how these pieces all come together? Perhaps these vendors could agree on standards that should be incorporated into all devices/software/apps that would allow everything to communicate seamlessly …  just thinking out loud.