The other day, my good friend Vinnie gave me a hard time over my position regarding SAP Business ByDesign. That’s cool. We’d both rather take positions and then slug it out. Neither of us is wrong nor right but the debates matter because it’s one way that readers can decide for themselves what is most important to them. I took the story to a ‘higher court’ where I expanded the debate from a software only perspective.
In truth, Vinnie’s contention:
And the answer, unfortunately is, sensors, and scanners and mobile devices have been helping them a lot more than in recent years than enterprise software has. While enterprise software continues to increase its part of the IT budget faster than other tech categories.
…is pretty much right for the healthcare industry. It may not be so true in other service industries and certainly not in knowledge businesses. Then along comes Phil Baumann, who points me to Blog ROI, it’s about value stupid. Phil used to be an accountant who saw the error of his ways and became a healthcare professional. His position:
Simple question: why would a hospital have a blog? Or use Twitter? Or maybe even FriendFeed? Simple answer: value.
A hospital aught to be one of the most valued kinds of facilities in our communities. Every effort aught to be encouraged for such organizations to optimally utilize those resources which can improve the delivery of care, expand an organization’s presence, and even generate positive returns from the investments in those resources.
But not every organization blogs. Not every one needs to. Why? Because the theme of returns and cost efficiency have been propounded so heavily into our heads that we overlook the obvious. We need to kick ourselves and say: It’s about value, stupid.
I’m sure Vinnie would have something to say about that but Phil makes the case very well with a good list of things that might derive benefit. As a low cost, value delivery mechanism, blogs are pretty hard to beat. But as he says:
Whatever your background, a blog is a good start to a healthier hospital. Then again, you could just let someone else do all the talking for you while you keep handing cash over to lawyers and PR wizards instead of your nurses and doctors and capital equipment.
I’m not going to argue with that. If correct, then it gets more of Vinnie’s sensors, RFID tags etc into the hands of those delivering care. Rock on.
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