This is not unlike the deregulation of the banking or airline industries, or the challenge of foreign competition in manufacturing. In each of those cases, there had to be a transformation, and there were winners and losers. There's not any one silver bullet in the healthcare industry that's as dramatic, but there is a corollary to the automated shop floor, which is the patient-care process. He delivers on what he promises. No wonder Chapman was named one of PC Week's Top 10 CIOs in 1997.
Opportunities continue to beckon.
The parallels between the acute-healthcare industry and the airline industry are most striking when you enter Vencor's operations control room. Beyond a darkened Vencor Command Center monitors every hospital, identifies and prioritizes problems, and communicates fixes in real-time. They monitor all of our 500 servers in the field. We'll eventually begin to bring more of them back here to our central location, where we have about 700 servers. Two years ago, Vencor embarked on a project to centralize its computer operations.