April 12th, 2010

I recently had the opportunity to sit with one of our Canadian clients - a top level provincial health CIO – at the end of a long day to share his vision and future patient flow needs. It was one of those frank exchanges that early on drew me to our industry...I had brought a presentation (of course!), but never even opened it – we just sat back and shared our thoughts.

We discussed many things - the challenge of integrations across multiple legacy systems, working through regional prejudices and preferences towards a common standard, the growing importance of active referral management across the continuum, and what he and his board thought the ‘game changers’ would be in the years to come.

‘Game Changer’ – I can tell all that nothing sends a shiver down a technology vendor’s spine like that term!! At Strata Health, we spend so much time and energy stretching ourselves over the horizon to set our vision ahead of client needs and standards... then we hope we get it right !! But with IT’s exponential evolution – how does a vendor stay in front of that dreaded ‘curve’ ? Ahead of the Game Changers ?

Well, we do it with dialogue not presentations as this conversation reinforced. We do it by listening to our clients – both at the front line and, as in this example – to the executive visionaries. We share other visionary clients’ views – then bringing these similar and disparate views, geographies and people together to debate and learn from each other, while we listen... hopefully a lot more than we speak (sometimes tough for me!!!).