Gingrich: Health Care Systems Must InteroperateGingrich: Health Care Systems Must Interoperate

To some people's delight and others' dismay, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is pulling up his chair in the private sector these days, as chairman of his own consulting firm and founder of the Center for Health Transformation. But Gingrich still has plenty to say. To the tech industry, in particular, he emphasizes the need for vendors, solution providers and integrators to get on the same page.

Too often, Gingrich says, innovation in the private sector happens in a stovepipe, with little consideration for the big picture. "This is not complicated; can you intercommunicate [with other solutions]? Set up a computer and try."

Gingrich tells of an integrator that was developing IT systems for two of the largest health-care providers in Northern California. "I asked [the integrator] if they were going to make sure [the systems] could talk to each other, and the answer was no," Gingrich says. "Here you have the same [company] designing noninteroperable standards for two institutions that occupy the same physical space. There's a point where you go, 'This is stupid.'"

According to Gingrich, Henry Ford's greatest contribution to society was not the assembly line but standardization. And it's standardization in terms of IT that needs to be better applied for the public and private sectors alike to really progress.

"If [your solution is the smartest] and you don't get involved, you are by definition turning the solution space over to people who are dumber than you," he says. "To really promote progress, I would say to [solution providers] out there, if you think you've got a better way of doing something, then you have an absolute obligation to explain how."

Does that mean solution providers should share industry secrets with the competition? Yes, Gingrich says, because in the long run, everyone benefits.

"Part of how you change the world is you change qualitatively the matrix by which you measure," Gingrich says. "In the short run, it doesn't change anything--it doesn't get you the next contract--but in the long run, it changes everything. Somewhere, somebody is going to invent that smart RFP, for example. It's going to work, and that will change every RFP that is offered from then on."