As the sun sets on a Friday night in the 1990s, voices and explosions from a movie trailer continue to loop in the background as you rush past a towering yellow gumball machine and prepackaged popcorn buckets. You tap your foot against the fading carpeted floor in nervous anticipation as you scan the brightly painted shelves for the newest release on VHS.

Video stores are dead. One of the major reasons why the rental video store market collapsed was their inability to adapt to evolving technology and customer needs. That being said, there are certain lessons that we can learn from the paradigm shift in the home-video viewing industry. Applying these lessons when choosing an EHR will keep your patients engaged and coming back to your practice.

When you really think about it, healthcare is all about community. In a complex society, no individual or family is completely on their own. All of us need others to help ensure our health and welfare, whether they are family members, teachers, physicians, nurses, physical therapists, or mental health providers.

National Health IT Week, which runs September 23-27, is the perfect time to pause and think about the communities to which we all belong. This year’s theme, “Supporting Health Communities,” centers on numerous points of engagement pertaining to public health and Population Health.

As the Health IT Week website notes, each of the points demonstrates “how information and technology can transform health and create healthy communities.”

In late 1996, a group of Compaq and Netcentric executives gathered at an office park outside Houston and gave birth to a new idea: cloud computing. Technology would never be the same.

According to MIT Technology Review, Compaq’s 50-page internal analysis of ideas discussed at that meeting accurately predicted that enterprise software would transform into cloud services and that the future meant “application software is no longer a feature of the hardware — but of the Internet.”

Today, cloud computing fuels all kinds of businesses growth. Successful enterprises routinely align IT “infostructure” with business goals. If solutions aren’t nimble, scalable, secure, convenient, and low cost — they aren’t solutions at all.

During an April 2018 TED Talk in Vancouver, British Columbia, neuroscientist Poppy Crum, chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories, posed a question that should resonate with anyone who works in the fields of healthcare and technology: “What happens when technology knows more about us than we do?”

Crum is among the featured speakers at next week’s Health 2.0 Annual Conference in Santa Clara, California. Whether we like it or not, she told her TED Talk audience, advances in technology mean that we are “already sharing parts of our inner lives.”

One of the tasks of a healthcare IT company is to develop ways to creatively respond to the realities of our information-saturated age, ensuring that patients’ personal and medical histories are protected while enabling providers to use medical data to improve lives.

To thrive in today’s healthcare environment, practices need to understand how a rapidly changing market is making a subtle shift from patient-centric care to creating a customer-centric experience.

Thanks to brands such as Uber and Amazon, today’s healthcare customers are more tech-savvy and connected than previous generations. They expect instant results, delivered with five-star service. For example, according to Google, searches for “open now” are increasing while searches for “store hours” are declining.

The Economist calls it "time poverty" — the notion that there’s not enough time to do all the work we need to do. Against that backdrop, healthcare providers still need to find ways to connect.

In his classic “Economics in One Lesson,” Henry Hazlitt wrote: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” ¹

Change “economics” to “healthcare,” and you have a useful guide for medical practices challenged to deliver quality care while controlling costs: Think about long-term consequences for all.

Whether you’re cutting into a juicy steak or biting into a crisp apple, food safety metrics were established to keep you safe and feeling healthy. Meeting all of these requirements can feel overwhelming, so tools have been created to make the process easier and more efficient for food and beverage manufacturers.

The same could be said about quality measures in the healthcare system.