Do not halt at the fringe of healthcare world

After departing from the comfort of the technical territory, the next challenge for an IT technician new to health IT would be testing the water of the field of medicine.

For anyone who are not from healthcare background, the hospital is a place you won't visit unless you are, or someone close to you is, in a deteriorated health condition, in other words, ill. Sometimes this makes interesting effect. Even if you are totally healthy you may feel ill just because you are in a hospital!

My advice is follow the maxim of Sun Tzu, "If you have entered enemy territory but not proceeded deep into it, that's facile ground. Do not halt there."

In fact, just visiting a hospital would not increase your knowledge about healthcare considerably. You need to more proactive to start learning something about medicine. Escorting your nanny to regular check-ups would not make you any closer to put "health" before your IT specialist title.

Ray Murakami

First, leave the comfort of the techy home territory

As a health IT analyst having informatics as the primary expertise, there is one thing I have kept in my mind: never assume myself to be a technical expert, but commit to be a professional in healthcare.

Thus I have followed the maxim by Sun Tzu, "Never fight in your home territory. It's the dispersive ground where you can't keep the formation and morale."

If I resort to the position of a technical expert in general informatics, I would risk my focus to miss the ultimate costumer, the patient, by talking about the aspects only inside of computers and networks.

I have seen lots of health IT technicians who concentrate only on IT issues and are hesitant to leave their home territory. They made me feel left alone while we are talking with clinicians on technical issues. That's really the dispersive ground.

My tactics is refraining to use technical jargons as far as possible and introducing clinical examples as much as possible. That would move the battle ground a bit away from the technical ground and closer to the healthcare side where the clinicians and patients reside.

My personal observation is that most of the failed health IT projects have been fought on such dispersive grounds, intensively technical territories.

Ray Murakami

Revisiting Sun Tzu's Nine Grounds - This time Informatics meets Medicine.

Sun Tzu said, "The history has seen clumsy victories by hurried hands, but never a perfect win by wary hands."

I am afraid that my blog is becoming another proof of his claim. So I will change my strategy to seek speed rather than perfection.

Since the last update, I have been studying at a postgraduate programme of health informatics and learned a lot. I would like to put them into the context of The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

To begin with, I am going to revisit the "Nine Grounds". This time from the proximity to informatics to the very heart of medicine.

This is also a challenge one of my lecturers put on me by pointing out that I am still playing safe in the realm of health informatics.

OK, let's start diving into the hostile territory :)

Ray Murakami