Labor

Over the past two years I have found myself increasingly involved in the movement to use technology to increase organizational agility. This movement had relied on manufacturing technology speed and precision improvements for the past two hundred years with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Recently, this is all changing as cheap access to high-speed internet and communications technologies are enabling true interaction and work product creation in distributed teams. A few weeks ago I participated in a small summit meeting at the Mountain Quest Institute (MQI) in Frost, West Virginia. MQI is a neat place, certainly restful and supportive of deep thinking.

In the healthcare space, we are beginning to see huge investments in health information technology from the US Federal government influence the direction of development. Meanwhile, integrated clinical information systems at hospitals in the 1980s found huge challenges integrating data and providing a managerial value to the health providers. Indeed, they were deisgned to help the administrators with their analytics and quarterly reports to CMS or other regulartory bodies.