30 Years Ago In H.I.S.-tory by Vince Ciotti

© 2017 H.I.S. Professionals, LLC, all rights reserved

News from

November

1987 and

relevance for

today

Ads From November 1987• We’re starting this month with a couple of interesting ads from

Bill Child’s Healthcare Computing & Communications magazine.

• First, a stunning 2-page ad for one of the leading LIS systems at the time – do you recognize the name “PathNet?” Amazing to think today’s #1 HIS vendor with over $5B in annual revenue started out as “only” an LIS vendor during the 80s, not releasing their Millennium HNA clinical system until the early 1990s…

• Cerner’s major competitor back then was Sunquest -the two duked it out in several LIS selection our firm ran in the ‘90s.

• Amazing that Sunquest is still around 30 years later too, though not quite as big

A Four-Page Ad!

• This vendor spent quite a lot of dough on a 4-full-page series of ads, that alternated with 4 pages of content, inviting the reader to guess just who it was that they were talking about…

• My guess after the first 2 ads was either SMS, McAuto or HBO, the three HIS giants back then, but then the 3rd page had me stumped: $5 Billion! Maybe it was Cerner projecting their revenue in 30 years time? Who would you guess it was??

Who’d A Thunk It!?• NCR (National Cash Register)!

I’d have never guessed…

• NCR was headquartered in Dayton OH at the time, with 62K employees most of whom worked on… guess what?

• They were one of the BUNCH group battling IBM in the mainframe market, with MEDNET as their main HIS that ran on their 9300 IP box, featuring 32-bit system architecture and VLSI tech.

• They claimed 77 MEDNET hospital clients back then.

Fast FAX Facts• Interesting story on Delta

Medical Center in MS that installed a FAX system to send STAT orders from nurse stations to ancillaries, and then get the results back.

• Reminds me of a similar one called “TeleVideo” I saw on my second SMS installation at Good Samaritan Hospital up in Suffren, NY, way back in 1970.

• Ironically, we helped Delta replace the FAX system around Y2K with Meditech’s order entry & results reporting.

Brilliant Forecast• Art Randall wrote fascinating

columns in HCC, and his November one described how the healthcare industry is rapidly changing in 1987:

• Art predicted: “the 7,000 plus hospitals will decrease to perhaps 5,000 by the year 2000… and the 1.2 million acute-care beds will decrease to perhaps 75% of that size.”

• I worked for Art for 2 years at McAuto where he was in charge of Sales & Marketing – such a bright, witty and charming guy it’s a shame that he passed away far too early…

• So how did his above statistical predictionswork out? Check the stats on the next page to see just how smart this man was:

2017 Hospital Stats• Recent studies by the AHA, CDC, etc., sure bear Art’s forecast out:

• Anyone dare to predict what the #s will be like in 30 more years?

Self-Developed

• In the 1960s, only the largest hospitals could afford an inhouse mainframe and dozens of programmers to write HIS software, which in those days were mainly financial systems: AR, BL, GL, etc.

• By the 1970s, shared systems like SMS & McAuto started to blossom, selling hundreds of hospitals each their financial systems.

• In the 80s, mini-computer vendors like HBO, DCC, JS Data, etc., sold thousands of hospitals their highly affordable HIS systems, which by then included early clinicals like Orders and Results.

• A feature article by the CIO of Baptist Memorial Hospital in TN, a 3-hospital IDN with over 2,000 beds, on their self-developed approach for an HIS. Interesting to review how IT platforms evolved over time:

- The vendor has all your data,

- They charge as much as they can,

- Slow response-times are on your end,

- You trust their security & back-ups,

- You’re at the mercy of telecom (web),

- Hard to get data when you convert.

Yeah, I am a bit of a Luddite but these parallels are cute...

Today’s Platforms• In the 90s, micro-computer (PC) systems took off, starting with

bedside systems, growing into most ancillary departments.

• In the 2000s, server-based systems ruled, with VM-ware devices whose tiny physical size was the opposite of their Terra capacity.

• Where is hardware technology going today? Why, in the cloud, which might be where some people’s heads are when they think it’s different than the shared system approach of the 1970s:

PCs Back Then• To end on a more positive note, check

out the growth of PCs from 1977 in this article on device integration.

• The author goes on to describe 1987 PCs with “minicomputer levels of processing capacity (32-bit processors, a megabyte of memory, and up to four gigabytes of hard disk storage).”

• I remember well buying my first Mac SE back in 1987 – cost about $2K ( a lot of $s then), and ran on 400K diskettes.

• After running out of room for the disks, I added a 1 Meg hard drive for about $1K – it hurt, but as a new entrant into HIS consulting, I was writing an awful lot of proposals…

Flash!• Just got my latest copy of

one of the few print HIT magazines still being published these days: Health Data Management.

• When I got to this ad on the back cover, I couldn’t believe my eyes – have they been snooping into my emails with Mr. HIStalkabout this 1987 episode?!

• Anyway, cute to see how someone else appreciates how hot the Mac SE was back in the 1980s…

Next Month

• Some interesting news & articles from December 1987:

– Pay phones – remember them? Ever wonder what they cost?? Answers from the New York Telephone company.

– Meditech – a review of how this upstart LIS vendor from the 1970s was now becoming a major player in the HIS market.

– CyberSecurity – no, they didn’t use that term in 1987, but a fascinating article on computer fraud digs deeply into it.

– Sunquest – interesting article by Dr. Sidney Goldblatt who founded it way back in… can you guess how long ago?

Hope you enjoy jumping back to these early days of HIS-tory –glad to hear any of your memories or negative feedback:

Vince Ciotti HIS Professionals, LLC

505.466.4958 vciotti@hispros.com