A Vision Shift

Vision shift was the title of one of the first slides we reviewed at the HL7 Board Retreat this week.  It appears below.

Today	Tomorrow
Follow the curve	Ahead of the curve
Stovepipes and silos	Systemness
Policy advice	Policy advocacy
Clinical focus	Clinical to also enable financial
Incremental growth	Vigorous growth
Doing too much with too little	Having the resources to do it right
Hope for adoption	Enable adoption
Believe in value	Demonstrate value

The left hand column is where HL7 is today.  The right hand column is where we want to be.  This is feedback from the HL7 Advisory Council, but feedback that was widely acknowledged on the HL7 Board as both truth and vision.

I was impressed by the vision presented here.  I was even more deeply impressed by the work of the business model tiger team in their preliminary framework for a business plan.  I was astounded by the action taken by the board today to operationalize those parts of the framework that are ready to be initiated, and the trust they placed in the HL7 executive leadership to do so.

Some few have been following a discussion that Arien Malec started with the XKCD cartoon that's been making the rounds, and that Wes Rishel followed up on (if you cannot see it, ask Wes to make it public).  Not one person on the HL7 Board or the Advisory Committee is a social media geek, and I don't think any of them present are on Google+.  Yet, this slide, and the subsequent actions of the board seem as if they were designed to be a direct response to some of Wes's critiques.

There are some follow up actions for other members to craft a communications plan about what was decided today, so I won't go into all of the details.  In short, there are some very positive outcomes about making HL7 more accessible to others, demonstrating value, encouraging cross enterprise architecture thinking (systemness), and enabling, rather than hoping for adoption.  It's not about what do we have that can solve your problem (I have a hammer, show me your nails), but rather, let us think about what the real stakeholder pain points are, and how we might help to address them, with what we have today, or with what we could be doing ourselves or in conjunction with others.

Who knows, perhaps the next ONC S and I initiative that you hear about could originate from an idea started from within HL7.