A Lesson In Interoperability With Malcolm Gladwell

Best-selling author uses former events in history to relate to interoperability in healthcare

On Feb. 6 at the HCI-DC 2014 in Washington, D.C.—a public conference co-hosted by the Gary and Mary West Health Institute (WHI) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)—Malcolm Gladwell, journalist, bestselling author, and speaker, gave three lessons in culture, framing and consequence in relation to interoperability in healthcare.

As a former healthcare reporter for the Washington Post, Gladwell admitted that he wasn’t an expert in either healthcare or interoperability, but on Healthcare Innovation Day, he was ready to take lessons from history and apply them to what the industry can do today to improve interoperability in healthcare.

Gladwell’s first example involved the Bekaa Valley Turkey Shoot, an incident in the Lebanon War of I982, when the Israelis shot down all 87 Syrian fighter jets within two days while only losing one of their own, which was due to accident, not Syrian attack.