Your Healthcare IT Project Can Be Both a Technical Success and a Multibillion Dollar Business Failure

Healthcare COO and CFO, what is the cost of silos in your organization?  If you’re the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the cost is in the billions.

Technical Success, Business Failure

When the VA and Oracle Health launched their audacious EHR modernization in 2018, they optimized for a technical goal: standardizing care across 1,300 facilities.  In doing so, they optimized for architectural consistency while neglecting the operational realities of a high-volume clinical environment.  When the new system finally met the clinician in 2020, the workflows were so disconnected from reality that a 15-second blood test order now took three minutes.

That friction didn’t stay at the keyboard.  It traveled straight to the balance sheet.  In fact, the user experience was so counterintuitive and cumbersome that it became a massive drag on the bottom line.  The fallout was staggering:

• Productivity: dropped by 40%.
• Staffing: pharmacy sites had to increase headcount by 60% just to maintain service levels.
• Safety: over 140 cases of patient harm were attributed to the system.

By 2023, the program was officially “reset” to focus on usability.  Reset is code for: we built a system that passed all the technical specifications, but failed the providers.

While your scale is different, the mechanics of failure are identical.  Your IT team is focused on the technical plumbing: integrations, database architecture, installation checkpoints.  These are necessary, but insufficient.  While IT is good at checking boxes on a requirements list, no one is asking, “Does this technology make it easier for a provider to treat a patient?”

The Healthcare Shift From Project to Product

The fix is to adopt a Product Mindset.  In healthcare, the product isn’t the software; it’s the seamless delivery of care.  This requires thinking holistically about the entire patient journey from intake to discharge.  Who does the patient interact with?  What are the patients (and providers) feeling at each stage in the journey?  These questions create empathy for the humans in the loop, the ultimate product management superpower.

When you treat your clinical systems as living products designed to support care delivery, rather than static IT installations, you align the technology with real-world workflows before you go-live.  When you optimize for clinical outcomes over a go-live date and an IT budget, you protect your ROI and your staff’s productivity.

The VA is spending billions to fix this after the fact.  You don’t have to.  If you’re concerned that your IT team is on-track to deliver a technically sound, but clinically unusable solution, let’s talk. 

Contact me for a discovery call.  Let’s align your technology with your clinical needs and protect your organization from a massive productivity hit.