(Please excuse the quality of my drawing, it didn’t scan well.)

A few weeks ago we were swimming.  My wife and children made it known that the day wasn’t going to be a success unless dad was in the pool. My ten year-old and I were standing on the edge of the pool beside the diving board when all of a sudden the board makes the characteristic sound of somebody springing off the end, “boiiinnngggg”. We both looked just in time to see a man complete one and a half flips through the air and make a perfect entry into the water. As the man surfaced, my son turned to me and said, “Dad, he looks like he’s the same age as you. Can you do that Dad?”

On most days, I’m quick enough to outthink my 10-year-old–this wasn’t most days. I could’ve done or should have done a number of things other than the thing I chose. Without a moment’s hesitation, I put my arm around my son, and said, “I can do that.” His eyes beamed. At that moment, my wife asked. “Do what?” Then she said the one thing that guaranteed that I would try and impress my son, “you can’t do that!” I can be told a lot of things. The one thing I can’t be told is that I can’t do something. I gave her my sunglasses–in return, she gave me the look. You know the look, the one that says, I thought I married somebody smarter than that.

There’s a gracefulness that happens when a tanned and toned athletic body glides through the air, seeming to levitate, suspending the laws of gravity, and making a graceful ripping sound as the hands cut through the surface of the water. Then there’s me. I visualized taking three steps, rising into the air, and beginning my somersault during the lift. Even the boiiinnnggg didn’t sound right as I left the board; it was more like the noise of someone playing the cello with a piece of celery. The nearby bathers recognized the sound, and leaned forward in anticipation. As I rose, two, perhaps three inches above the board, I began my tuck and roll. My son was pulling for me, my wife pulling him away from the site of the pending disaster.

In the sport of diving there are numerous sanctioned dives; inward pikes, back dives, forward somersaults. The ¾ flip is not one of them.  The sound of the ¾ flip is unmistakable. The flip ends in the reclining position; a nice position if you are in bed, a not so nice position if it’s your back smacking the water. Three fourths of most things is not good. You don’t watch ¾ of a movie, or fly ¾ of the way to your destination.  Three fourths of a healthcare network isn’t all that great, especially if you’re in the missing fourth.

What’s the likelihood this will work?  Are the chances of success greater to have numerous governing bodies builing their own?  Does something already exist that might be useful?  There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the network of Rhios.  That has me thinking about a few of the national networks that already exist–banking, Amazon, airline reservations, phone companies.  Is there something that can be learned from how they built theirs?  Does the healthcare network have to be built from scratch?  Is it possible to piggyback the transport of the information on an existing network?  What do you think?

Take the phone network as an example–forgive me if I step all over the technology here, it’s not my strong suit. If I call from Philadelphia, to San DIego, the call is transported on the backbone and routed across (handed off) several telcos, often via a route that if it was diagrammed would make no logical sense. There is built in redundancy and backup. Telco networks and billing systems are designed to use these “hand offs” via a system of interconnects and mediation. I don’t have the network built in to my land line, and I don’t need to know anything about how my call gets from point A to point B.

I’m wondering, can the same principle apply in healthcare. Since the networks don’t change the health record, can there be a collection of fail safe nodes whose sole purpose is to pass my health record from A to B, have it updated at B, and then pass it back? I know this is leaving out 99% of the difficulty, but can this idea work?