What’s Holding Up the Healthcare IT Infrastructure?

Usually we do a Fun Friday entry, but today didn’t seem like a great day to do a Fun Friday.  Although, when I saw this image shared by Aaron Miri, I thought it was the perfect middle ground of something that’s eye opening and might give you something to think about as you head into the weekend.

The world of #Healthcare #IT 🧑🏾‍💻 pic.twitter.com/wIMPsSJScn

— Aaron Miri (@AaronMiri) June 22, 2022

There’s a lot of truth to this graphic in technology and more specifically in health IT.  It’s amazing how many legacy projects are still powering the internet as we know it.  What’s amazing to me is how resilient many of the internet designs have been throughout all the years.

Of course, it does beg the question of what are some of the small projects that are still holding up the health IT world.  My guess is that every CIO can think about what it is for their organization.  It’s likely what keeps them up at night and they likely don’t have a good replacement solution.  Although, I bet it’s something different for every organization.  There’s only one person who knows how to support and maintain some of our legacy systems which we have to continue to maintain for compliance reasons (Shout out to all the legacy archiving vendors out there who can help with this).

In the comments of Miri’s tweet someone suggested the project holding health IT up is MUMPS.  They’re not wrong.  It’s probably a handful of people in Wisconsin and Boston instead of Nebraska, but it’s likely getting smaller and smaller.  It really is amazing to think about how much of healthcare is running on the back of MUMPS.  Will that catch up to us eventually?  I don’t know anyone out of college that’s excited to work on MUMPS.

Another one that came to mind to me is the pager infrastructure.  I recently saw a resident post about their first pager as almost a right of passage that they’re a doctor.  Is there anyone else that thinks that’s terrible considering we know that resident has a smartphone in their pocket.  All of that aside, I’ve heard many healthcare organizations talk about the need to adopt things like secure text because their pager infrastructure felt like the picture above.

Those are a few that I was thinking about.  I’d love to hear what other things you’d add to the list.  Let us know in the comments or on Twitter with @hcittoday.  Have a great weekend and reach out to someone you care about and tell them you love them.