You present an excellent argument! Integration of software/computing with healthcare/medicine is what I hope to focus the rest of my life on, so I surely hope we can make significant progress in that area.
I see many topics where a proper mix of IT and medicine could make a real difference - for example, improving WorldVista, adding IA agents to mine the data and suggest things.
Then I see the sorry thing that calls itself Health-IT and which is just a new way to put government stimulus money into dull uses and overpriced software.
I'm the founder, lead developer and clinical researcher behind StethoCloud - http://www.stethocloud.com/
I find being a clinician helps me understand the problem when it comes to the diagnosis of pneumonia in children. I understand the scope of the problem, its current diagnostic hurdles and as a hacker, I know how to build the app and cloud backend for the project.
Having exposure and knowledge in other fields of computer science, mathematics and engineering helps too. I'm glad I took the Stanford AI and Machine Learning courses that gave me a good understanding of what machine learning techniques are capable of doing given sufficient data to train on.
I would say having knowledge of those fields was important in order for me to articulate the problems clinicians face with the diagnosis of pneumonia in children to data scientists in a way that they could understand how their skills could be helpful and thus convince them to help out with this project.