Can we anticipate how IT will change health care?

Before we can assess what impact IT might have on health care, we need to understand the complex nature of today’s healthcare system and the distinction between projects that are simple, complicated and complex.

Baking a cake is a simple project: the first time you follow the recipe you might not be so sure about how it will come out, but the second time it comes out better and you feel more secure that every time you bake the cake it will come out the way you want it to. You might alter the recipe to make it better, but the idea of a recipe is that you will always get a certain result.

Complicated projects involve bringing multiple simple projects together. We can understand what elements need to be considered in an airline’s IT system: the number of seats, the different categories of passengers, the available slots on the schedule, the number of planes. An IT system can be set up to capture every element of that system and determine where the passengers sit, when they go, how much they pay, and all of that can be made transparent to the passengers. It is a complicated system, a matter of taking a whole bunch of atomic elements and following a very clear recipe to build an information system. It might take a while and cost a lot, but it will provide a dependable result that can be reproduced.

A good example of a complex project is raising a second child. As you raise the first child, you develop a recipe and feel than try to apply recipes at all, you need to follow the child and respond to his or her lead.

Health care was once a complicated system; it is now complex. The shift came about as our thinking about disease evolved from an acute to a chronic model.

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