Some meetings live long in the memory, others not so much.
Perhaps the most memorable business meeting of my life happened in Oslo, home of the Fram Museum. The Fram was the ship used by Amundsen to ship his dogs, sleds, men and supplies to his successful mission to be the first person to reach the South Pole. His approach differed sharply from the well-funded, mechanised assault architected by Captain Scott, who was attempting to do the same but died not long after finding Amundsen’s flag at the pole. My meeting with The Fram was memorable, but it wasn’t why I was in Oslo.
I flew to Oslo to meet Professor Margunn Aanestad after I had found a fifteen-minute video clip on YouTube where she talked about why some health IT projects achieve rapid scale-up, even to national scale, and others fail to get traction even with big budgets and government support. I emailed Margunn, and amazingly, she agreed to meet me.
We met in Starbucks, not far from The Fram Museum. Over the course of our meeting, she explained how she had been studying the success and failure of health IT projects all over the world for many years. She explained that although IT projects often use the language of architecture, in fact, success is more like gardening than architecture. Scaling to national success often starts with a small seed of a project which has few actors but quickly delivers benefits to the end users, the clinicians. Clinicians then tell others and, hey presto, scale-up.
She also told me about the concept of “the installed base”. Scale-up is more likely if your new initiative works with what is already there in the local hospitals so that you don’t have to spend a fortune ripping and replacing your existing infrastructure (roots). She called this a “cultivational and modular” approach with interoperability at its core.
I took this approach to North East England, where we cultivated the highly successful shared care record project, The Great North Care Record, from a seed planted in a single Trust and a single general practice but which has now scaled to 12 trusts, 360 GP practices and several local authorities.
Let’s meet at HETT – it might be memorable
I will be at HETT with my colleagues from Parsek and on stage talking about scale-up on the Workforce, Adoption and Productivity at 10:50 am on the 27th, or you can find me at the Parsek stand (G30). We are about to plant Vitaly, a multidisciplinary team meeting platform for regions with a disparate installed base.
Got a complex MDT to run across organisations and systems? Come and meet me, it might be memorable.
Prof. Joe McDonald, Medical Director at Parsek
Views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organisation, employer or company.