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BY IKE SEÑERES
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Monday, January 9, 2017
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MOUNTAINEERS would say that they climb mountains “because it’s there.”
In the Six Million Dollar Man movie, the scientists decided to rebuild a half dead astronaut and turned him into a superhuman because “we have the technology” as they said. These quotations would seem to be applicable to the cause of computerizing, automating and modernizing the delivery of health services in this country.
If anyone would ask why we should do it, we could just say “because it’s there” and “because we have the technology.” Aside from that, we could just say “because the people need it” and “because we want to help more people.”
I don’t think that we should really argue further why we should do it, but these two should be reasons enough.
There was a time not too long ago when computerization was expensive, and so was interconnection. Imagine how expensive computerization was in the mainframe era.
Interconnection was expensive too, but the real problem at that time was not so much the costs, but the capacity and reliability.
Not to anyone’s surprise, the high costs were carried over to the client-server era, wherein the capacity and reliability issues were also carried over. If you can imagine how much a network of mainframes and dumb terminals would cost, you could also imagine how much a network of data centers and workstations would also cost.
Well, nothing really happened on the way to the forum, but something happened during our time that has completely changed the way we computerize and the way we interconnect. And as if coming to us like an avalanche, not just one thing happened, but about half a dozen of these things happened, not counting the minor ones. I think that the avalanche happened when the Internet Cloud emerged, followed by broadband connectivity not too far behind.
The rest is history, because the Internet of Things (IOT) also came along, followed by Big Data. In the midst of all that, network servers became faster and cheaper, and data storage were divorced from the servers, at the same time becoming cheaper too.
Some might say that these half dozen things did not really happen in the sequence that I described, but never mind that, because the end result now is that in the overall, both computerization and interconnection have not only become better and cheaper, they now also have more capacity and reliability.
If in the past, organizations could cite many reasons why they will not computerize and interconnect, they have in effect run out of reasons now. Perhaps the reasons for not computerizing and not interconnecting would vary from one industry to another, but in this article, let us just limit our discussion to the realm of the healthcare industry.
As Madame Carmen Guerrero Nakpil had aptly described it, “technology is just a better way of doing things.” Taking off from that, I would be willing to admit that even without new technology, we could still continue to do things as we have been used to doing, but surely, we would not be able to do it in a better way.
Citing an example, we could say that we could still communicate via pigeon mail, but how much better can that be compared to email?
When email came along, people started calling postal mail as snail mail, comparing it to the speed of email. Nowadays however, we have to be adept to the changes around us.
Not too long ago, you were considered behind if you do not use email. Nowadays however, you are already considered behind if you are still using email, and not using Instant Messenger (IM) or Personal Messenger (PM).
In theory, it would be possible to provide the same quality of healthcare to the patients of public hospitals and the patients of the private hospitals, and that is so because the same technologies that are available to the private hospitals are also available to the public hospitals.
In the past, it could be said that the main cause of the technological divide between these two is money, but that obstacle should not really stop us now. On one hand, we should say that we should use new technologies for our public hospitals “because it’s there”. On the other hand, we should also say that we should do so because “we have the technology” and all we have to do is to go get it.
The first thing we must do it to provide broadband connectivity to the public hospitals, so that they could connect to the Internet Cloud. If they have these two, they could start building their own Big Data, building that in tandem with their own IOT network.
Needless to say, they could also use the Big Data and the IOT assets of the rest of the internet world. With that, they need not acquire their own network servers and data storage, because everything they need could be availed of from the Internet Cloud in many service packages such as “Hardware as a Service” (HaaS) and “Software as a Service” (SaaS).
All these services could be charged to their Miscellaneous and Other Operating Expenses (MOOE), instead of their Capital Expenses (CAPEX)./PN
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