Let's examine the basic economics of healthcare (by no means the whole story, just enough to inform basic insight).

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard by now that, where the majority of developed countries spend between 8–10% of GDP on health, America spends ~16%.

American health expenditure diverged from the rest of the world circa 1980. At that point, many other developed countries decided not to deregulate healthcare, while the US deregulated it, softening or removing limitations on advertising, consolidation, entry, pricing, and patent expiration, accompanied by a shift to privatization in many markets, to benefit from "managed competition."

The result was the birth of a new industry. The rationale for the deregulated industry was simple and explicit. It was supposed to offer significant efficiency and productivity gains, delivering more bang for the buck. Has it?

Great article by Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab. Note the challenges and obstacles to innovation in healthcare that he points out.

I focus on technological innovation because it drives innovation throughout the global economy, changing what we make, what we use, and what we do. Centers of technological innovation become centers of innovation across a broad economic spectrum for two reasons: innovation in technology is inseparable from the innovations that flow from it, and the regearing of a society for innovation of any kind has effects on law, capital, and business culture that spill across boundaries.

To become a world-class center of technological innovation, a society must have three basic elements:

• drive—a culture that supports change and hungers for it

• human capital—the personal abilities that make world-class technology possible

• a capacity for mobilization—a society’s ability to pursue ambitious new goals

These basic elements are more fundamental than any current performance metric or economic trend, and they are durable.

Good article from Eric Drexler. Eric is the author of Engines of Creation and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, is an adviser and consultant on technology strategy and emerging nanotechnologies. His personal blog is at Metamodern.com

I too focus on technological innovation for the same reasons he stated. I couldn't agree more with his analysis.

Administration officials have told agencies their spending plans for science and technology in fiscal 2011 should be for projects designed to drive economic growth, create energy independence, improve health, and bolster security, according to recently issued general guidance. Meanwhile, an analyst said the guidance shows that science and technology will be priorities for the Obama administration.

Agencies should include in their proposed budgets explanations about how they will redirect science and technology spending on four “practical challenges” the administration, according to a recent memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Peter Orzag, OMB’s director, and OSTP Director John Holdren said in the memo Aug. 4 that agencies should build on the science and technology priorities that were reflected by the economic stimulus law and the fiscal 2010 budget.

They said agencies should budget to:

• Apply science and technology strategies for economic growth.
• Promote energy technologies to will reduce energy dependence and mitigate climate change.
• Use biomedical science and information technology to improve health.
• Ensure technology is available to protect troops, citizens and national interests.

They also said dealing with the four challenges will require:

• Increasing the productivity of research institutions such as universities and laboratories.
• Strengthening science, technology and engineering education.
• Improving and protecting the country’s information, communications and transportation infrastructure.
• Bolstering the United States’ capabilities in space.

Science and Technology innovation to drive economic growth in energy and healthcare.

-Tune The Future-

U.S. chief technology office Aneesh Chopra says he’s working hard to enable the federal government to embrace innovation, user-friendliness and best practices, but doing so means modernizing purchasing rules and procedures.

The time for innovation has arrived for all industries with the increasing maturity of cloud computing.

-Tune The Future-

A Growing Number of Physicians Nationwide are Using Doctations to Run their Offices with Implementation Coordinated Completely Online

GARDEN CITY, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Doctations, Inc., today announced the rapidly growing use of its comprehensive office-patient management system to doctors nationwide, with implementation and all customer service coordinated completely online. Through this innovative system, doctors and patients share internet space to achieve better healthcare. Doctations leverages the Internet to share workload, conserve physician time, improve patient care and provide feedback to staff, practice managers and directors that can be used to optimize front, mid and back office operations.

“I am now using Doctations to manage all aspects of my practice, and the system was implemented completely online,” said Dr. Rick Love, otolaryngologist of Montgomery, AL. “I found it surprisingly easy to transition my practice to electronic records.”

Doctations allows physicians to manage all aspects of their practice online, and by doing so, they form a network with their patients and colleagues – the DocPatient Network. This cloud-based solution reduces overhead, saves time and enables doctors to collaborate on shaping solutions to the national healthcare crisis.

“As a practicing physician, I am thrilled to see doctors empowered with the online tools required to run their businesses more efficiently and move their practices towards the future – Internet healthcare,” said Dr. Louis Cornacchia III, M.D., F.A.C.S, and President and CEO of Doctations, Inc.

Doctations provides Internet-based technology as a service to physicians, other healthcare providers and patients – and forms the basis for connecting practices, providers and patients in one Internet space while simultaneously maintaining the privacy of each practice and patient. By implementing the medical practice management and digital documentation solutions as web-native tools, it is possible to provide doctors and patients with state-of-the-art, comprehensive solutions that are substantially less expensive than equivalent systems.

“I’ve already seen increased efficiencies in my practice,” said Dr. Denise Kelley, of Springtown, PA. “The flexibility of the Doctations system allowed me to coordinate the implementation at my convenience.”

Salesforce.com has acquired a stake in Practice Fusion, a developer of free, Web-based physician applications, the two companies said Thursday. The size of the investment wasn't disclosed.

Later this year Practice Fusion is expected to launch a new patient health record application that's based on Salesforce's Force.com cloud computing platform.

"With this investment from Salesforce.com, Practice Fusion is now backed by the enterprise cloud computing leader," said Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard, in a statement. "The technology, capital and leadership from this partnership will ensure that Practice Fusion continues to outpace our competitors who are sticking with expensive, legacy client/server software."

The forces of IT innovation in healthcare make inroads into Electronic Medical Records Management with Salesforce.com and Practice Fusion.

In the same vein as the article on BPMS, have you considered a SaaS based IT PPMS (Project and Portfolio Management Systems) tool for your next project? If you are in that process now, you're in luck as Gartner has recently released their review of those tools. The report can be found here.

Is there a gap between your customer mission / needs, and IT mission / service delivery capabilities? How can the SaaS IT PPMS tools help you close that gap? Well, for starters, we may consider some advantages of SaaS based PPMS tools such as Daptiv and AtTask.

* Deployment speed
* Low support requirements
* Cost effectiveness for small-medium deployments

Now, couple this with SaaS based BPMS modeling, simulation and testing in the Cloud for forecasting and needs discovery to improve a product or service process, and we have a quick on ramp for SaaS based PPMS to drive the project management deliverables, and SaaS BPMS to model, simulate and test the business process in the Cloud for say, IT as a service, or a repeatable process for modeling, simulation and testing of bioinformatics sequencing as conducted by Eli Lilly & Company.

Eli Lilly recently launched a 64-machine cluster computer to work on bioinformatics sequencing, completed the work, and shut down in 20 minutes incurring a total cost of $6.40 using Amazon's EC2 service vs. what would have been a 12 weeks process internally.

And this is today, just imagine the next wave of cloud computing - intelligent, autonomic clouds with adaptive SaaS / PaaS / IaaS applications / platforms / infrastructure that "sense" and respond to users, instantly adapting modules within the applications autopopulating elements of plans from similar activities, adapting platform requirements, offering cross cloud interconnects for modeling, simulation and testing, capturing requirements to execute such modeling and instantly adapting its platform and infrastructure to requirements through capacity on demand, grid computing, virtualization, and other technologies to accommodate that subscriber's temporary (project) mission requirements (though iterative process), and then release those resources upon completion.

There isn't a gap, there is a growing chasm, between client missions which require shortest time to market, cost effective, high quality, competitive solutions, and traditional IT business project, program, portfolio, and process management systems, tools, and methods.

While there are definite distinctions between PPM and BPM, not the least of which is the temporary and unique nature of projects vs. the ongoing operational nature of business processes, there are also similarities and an increasing a symbiotic relationship between these worlds.

The application of BPM to IT processes can provide for more streamlined IT processes, which can be leveraged by PPM in more efficient and timely project execution. Similarly, PPM can be applied to BPM in new process creation, and progressive elaboration of iterative (temporal) processes.

Given the cloud computing paradigm, we can see from the Eli Lilly example above that 12 weeks vs. 20 minutes is a significant order of magnitude change in the way the next wave of business will be conducted, and that will require a new way of thinking about, planning, executing, and managing, iterative (if temporal) business processes and projects.

Cloud computing represents a revolution in the speed of business execution, and I suspect that the cloud computing technologies will continue to evolve and advance at a pace that is faster than most businesses can adapt their processes and train their people.

This presents a business and technological inflection point that will be advantageous to cloud computing companies and organizations in the public and private sector with visionary leaders that will recognize the technological chasm that lies ahead.

Only those organizations with the visionary leadership and IT mission aligned to meet the needs of its customer mission at the speeds and economies provided by the cloud computing paradigm will cross that chasm into a new world of business conducted in ways we can barely imagine today.

-Tune The Future-

Many have discussed and commented on Cloud computing's benefits, as well as its risks, though I have see few discussions on Cloud computing's impact on business process re-engineering, and how to get from the existing internal business processes to a Cloud computing model.

For smaller organizations this may not be as great a concern as it would be for larger, more complex organizations, with many stakeholders.

It will be interesting to see how the major vendors of BPMS position themselves for this migration to Cloud computing.

We can be certain of one thing, and that is, the use of certain vendors BPMS offerings will naturally lead to integration with their product portfolio for the likes of IBM, Oracle, SAP, EMC, and others. And while the "pure plays" which do not have an extensive offerings portfolio beyond their BPMS offering can remain agnostic, will they or will they seek to ride the Cloud storm with a leader through a strategic alliance, partnerships, mergers, acquisitions or other methods?

The ever tightening integration of vendors product offerings with their BPMS offerings makes for a fascinating field of play. However, those organizations that plan on using a single BPMS to deploy numerous business process change initiatives may want to delve deeply in understanding the depth of integration between the BPMS being offered and the vendors other offerings.

Of course, there will be times when that integration is advantageous. You're infrastructure is already deeply committed to a single vendor, or you have a single BPR point and you only require the BPMS tool for a single initiative with which that vendor's offering is tightly integrated.

So, that level of integration is not necessarily bad with a vendor whose offerings are competitive in the marketplace and is financially stable. Then there are those that would rather not tie their BPMS to a single initiative or that BPMS vendor's product and services offering portfolio.

Both views are understandable, and ultimately becomes situation specific based on the needs and requirements of the organization undertaking the business process change management initiative.

What relationships do you see (if any) between Cloud computing, and the BPMS landscape as businesses and governments undergo this transition?

-Tune The Future-

Budget issues are biggest driver for cloud services: IDC

By Carol Ko , MIS Asia , 07/23/2009

The benefits commonly ascribed to the 'cloud' or on-demand model, in order or importance, are "easy/fast to deploy", "pay only for what you use", and "offers the latest functionality", according to a recent IDC research.

These three benefits out-rank others, including "less in-house IT staff, costs" and "low monthly payments", said Claus Mortensen, who cited the findings from the IDC Asia Pacific End-user Cloud Computing Survey released in January 2009.