Dell's Harry Greenspun: How to Re-engineer Health Care IT
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title=Dell, Perot Health Care Team}
It's been a little more than a year since Dell announced its acquisition of Perot Systems. How has the integration of
Perot affected Dell's health care IT business?
When you combine the legacy of Perot Systems and the legacy of Dell, we're
now the largest provider of health IT services globally, which most people
don't appreciate. We have literally hundreds of doctors and nurses and other
clinicians who have a real depth of experience in improving the quality of
health care delivery by using enabling technologies. And so what we're able to
do now is combine the reach of legacy Dell with the expertise of legacy Perot
to bring a broader range of solutions to a broader range of customers.
What is Dell's strategy as far as IT services in the health care
industry?
I think one of the challenges historically the nation has faced-and forget
about Dell for a second-is that the big adopters of advanced technologies have
been the large academic medical centers, the large practices, etc., but the
vast majority of health care is practiced in smaller community hospitals and
the average-size physician practice.
With the adoption rates certainly below 20 percent-some people say below 10
percent depending on the market-along with continuing to provide these very
advanced services for our large customers, one of the important things is, How
do we bring these kinds of advanced technologies to the average kind of
practice, the average-size hospital where really the bulk of medicine is
practiced right now?
In June Dell announced a deal with Practice Fusion to bring electronic
medical records into the cloud. How effective will cloud computing be in
allowing health care professionals to access and share medical records?
Cloud computing, I think, will be critical for more widespread adoption. By
hosting these applications in the cloud, handling not only the management of
these mission-critical applications as well as the privacy and security issues
associated with them and the exchange requirements, you're able to remove a lot
of that burden from physicians themselves and from the practices and from these
very resource-constrained hospitals, so that will be one big factor.
The other issue is that it will also allow those folks to benefit from a lot
more services. Along with just the hosting of these applications and the use of
health information exchange, they get more sophisticated dashboarding and
informatics, benchmarking, and quality comparisons. They can participate in
accountable-care organizations by being coordinated in the cloud. It will
really open the door to a much higher quality and a more efficient delivery of
care.
