The health care sector is still largely computer- and storage- agnostic, but things are changing -- slowly A long time ago, I was chatting with a couple of CTOs I met at a show. I’ll withhold their names but, to give some context, one manages the IT resources of a telecom company, and the other works for a large hospital.We didn’t speak much about telecom issues that day. Most of our conversation focused on problems and challenges that physicians face at their hospitals or at their offices.Our main discussion was about the lack of common standards in the health care industry, and how this creates a Tower of Babel-type environment where exchanging patients’ clinical data with other physicians or with hospitals becomes difficult and expensive. We agreed that, as a consequence, most exchanges of clinical data remain based on paper records. Every time we go to a doctor, we fill out a form in longhand with our medical history — and that form had better be accurate, because our lives may depend on it.In part, the CTOs and I ended up on the subject of health care technology because those issues can have such a profound impact on patients’ lives. In addition, both CTOs had read one of my columns in which I suggested a nationwide patient database, which set the stage for our discussion.At one point, the telecom CTO made a striking observation: “I am always relieved thinking that even if we make mistakes, nobody will die at my place because of them.” The hospital CTO nodded somberly in acknowledgment. Why am I recounting this particular conversation? Because a recent news article by Grant Gross of the IDG News Service reminded me that things haven’t changed much in the past year, and that President Bush’s deadline for a possible solution to the standards overload problem is still about a decade away.A preliminary and critical milestone, a plan for a national healthcare IT infrastructure, is expected by November. What does this have to do with storage? Well, think of the impact that other regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA had on the storage market (hint: compliance, information lifecycle management). It’s easy to imagine how much impact a unified healthcare infrastructure would have on selling storage and other technologies to those numerous doctors’ offices, of which an estimated 50 percent or more are still going the manual route.It’s also reasonable to expect that a common infrastructure will translate, in time, into more affordable solutions and, ultimately, lower operating costs for all healthcare providers. One desirable side effect of that infrastructure will be a reduction in human errors such as misreading medication information or inaccurate transcribing. After all, isn’t eliminating trivial errors a main benefit of using computer networks? A common IT infrastructure would boost sales of IT solutions, reduce health care operating costs, and potentially improve its quality. Mr. President, could we possibly try to speed that up?Join me on The Storage Network blog to discuss this and other topics.