As I said: our systems are not put their best use. Why?

The eHealth benchmarking study gives some clues. According medical directors in Europe the top 3 percieved barriers are: system incompatibility, getting people to agree on terminology and security. Financial concerns are right at the bottom.

This is fascinating for several reasons.

One reason is that incompatibility and security is relatively easy to solve. At least if you don’t place your demands unreasonably high. Mapping data between systems is not always fun, but my experience is that it’s doable. And getting a decent level of security is possible in all systems I know of. But it does take quite a bit of commitment from the customer.

Another reason is that discussions with customers so often focus on price and relatively unimportant bits of functionality. None of which, obviously, are big barriers.

Maybe the basic problem actually is what I hinted at: making eHealth systems useful requires groundwork in the customer’s organization. And we suppliers aren’t ready to help them with that. We are not staffed and we don’t have business models to handle it.

Suggestion: a little less focus on selling software, a little more on selling services. That may improve outcomes quite a lot.