Thomas Friedman, in his masterpiece, The World is Flat, writes about the flatteners that have propelled globalization, and reduced the world from a size medium to a size small, now even heading towards being a size extra-small. He lists outsourcing, off-shoring, open-sourcing, in-sourcing, supply-chaining, informing through giants like Google and Yahoo, and the final boost of wireless access as agents that have acted as steroids, pushing the world into a smaller and tighter corner. He points out that this is giving hitherto 'developing' giants like China, India and Russia the leverage they need to drive an existing giant like the US into a tight spot. Competition is getting tougher, the numbers of people with the skills and the ability to work efficiently from any corner of the world have increased, and as the world gets flatter, the tides are changing to shift economic prowess into new hands.
This is an exciting time for developing nations- not just India, China and Russia, but even for countries lagging behind on the development ranks. I see it as a thrilling opportunity, especially in the field of healthcare. For more than a decade now, the US has been battling disintegrated Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems that result in high health care expenditures and a myriad of inefficiencies in health care delivery. No one system works for everyone, but it seems like it is almost impossible to get the existing ones uprooted to embed a uniform EMR system that improves effectiveness and efficiency. There is a lesson to be learned for developing nations, still working on paper, and filing away records manually- they are fortunate enough to know what mistakes not to make. Thomas Friedman labels the new developing nations jumping into the playing field as "legacy free" and I agree with him wholeheartedly- they don't have to worry about the sunken costs of old systems, but instead have the potential to move fast and leap right into new technologies by adopting innovative, state-of-the-art information systems that allow them to quickly the bridge gaps, and maybe even fire-away ahead of what we know today.
It is clear that there is untapped potential, and much to be learned from mistakes made. Developing nations have an advantage, but it is now in their hands to find a way to pick it up, and run with it!
(Source: It's a Flat World After All, Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, April 3rd, 2005)
Enjoyed reading your post. Very good point about how difficult it can be to get existing databases to talk to each other, so that a full picture emerges, and data entry and other efforts are not duplicated. Coordination at the highest policy levels is probably required. It is interesting to think about whether this is a smaller problem in countries where the healthcare system is mostly publicly run as opposed to the US where it is largely in the private sector.
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