> Healthcare drives innovation more than any other industry except in times of war, but was very slow to implement IT solutions such as electronic records
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>It depends on what you mean by "drives innovation"
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>I think it's a mixed bag.
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>On the one hand, the very nature of the complex value chain in health care means that Ralph Kimball could have written an entire data warehousing book on just that one industry. Certainly the vast amount of intellectual content in health care makes it ripe for innovation.
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>Health care has been my favorite industry to work in - WIC, USDA, Medicaid/MDS, Cost Reporting and Case Mix, and I recently picked up a part time client in the health care, and I've always found the work to be the most interesting.
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>MicroStrategy and other self-service BI vendors have made a good fortunate on selling BI solutions - so the BI space in general has health care to thank for much of the face recognition that BI receives. Additionally, other "big boys" along the way (HP, EDS, IBM, Oracle) have gotten into health care over the years, and so they were certainly able to throw a large amount of money into R&D. Add to that, for decades health care got quite a bit of funding from the feds....certainly didn't hurt :)
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>Health care saw the rise of EBT benefits cards in the 1990's. I was part of the very early process with that with WIC in the 1990's and Bank South, and it was quite groundbreaking.
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>So yet, lots of innovation....BUT
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>...by the same token, Health Care also suffers, perhaps more than any other industry, of HUGE project delays due to incredibly complex legacy systems that need to be maintained/enhanced in parallel while new efforts occur. I've seen this up close and the effects can be a disaster - employee and contractor turnover due to immense frustration in project delays, project "start-overs", etc. Many projects get scrapped and started from scratch multiple times. Given the turnover rate in this industry, it's a bit hard to stay on track.

John is quite aware of who the players are in health care IT, large and small. His company is one of them. Last year at this time we went to the annual health care IT conference in New Orleans. There were hundreds of exhibitors, so many that the mammoth convention center was filled. I was told it was one of only two conferences that filled the whole place.