Healthcare as SaaS

Obama speaks intelligently of making economy accelerating investment with long-term benefit as a goal, and has highlighted Healthcare IT specifically. We applaud this perspective and believe that this is the right time to strongly push medical IT as a service. SalesForce has invested both profit and time supporting good causes, and in doing so helped create a set of municipal and educational applications that demonstrate clearly why most municipalities and school districts should get out of the IT business as soon as possible because most of the apps they need can be provided as a common service, better and at much lower cost (IT is not and should not be a core competence). The same is true of healthcare. We spend more per capita on healthcare than any other country and get at best incomplete and often mediocre healthcare as return. A lack of comprehensive data repositories is a critical problem, both for the cost-effective delivery of high-quality care, and as importantly for making intelligent decisions about what healthcare should be available to everyone (what makes sense). The HIPAA regulations have driven progress but at a glacial, governmental pace. Isn't this the time to reflect the SalesForce experience, and to use our cloud computing experience to create shared healthcare record repositories and SaaS services? A national healthcare record system is either a massive and daunting IT problem, or an insignificant use of either Google's or Microsoft cloud resources. I'm not one to a tout IT technology for the sake of IT technology but it surely feels like this is the right time for major change.