Data Management: Precision Agriculture Can Learn From Healthcare

When it comes to managing data, the precision agriculture industry could learn a lot from the healthcare industry’s own data management efforts.

In my brief foray into Healthcare Information Technology (IT), it took only a couple of weeks to discover that the challenges they faced were harshly reminiscent of what we’re facing in Ag Information Technology.

Yet from a business perspective, the business-to-business arm of Healthcare IT has been lucrative for at least a decade, as evidenced by the fact that there are about a dozen publicly-held Healthcare IT companies. So what’s the problem in Ag IT? Why aren’t pure Ag IT companies scaling like their counterparts in Healthcare IT? What’s holding Ag IT back?

Before I start, let me clarify some terminology. Healthcare IT is served by hardware and software companies whose mission is to improve patient safety, health care quality, efficiency, data collection and potentially help restrain rising costs. Ag IT is similar in that it is served by a combination of hardware and software companies. While I don’t discount the role of hardware in Ag IT, my analysis has been skewed towards software companies providing software across a range of areas. Table 1 shows some examples of different types of software products within each industry.