The Olympics venues in London have been built with reuse in mind, building on the ideas of the Archigram architects, the structures are modular, can be reconfigured, repurposed, or relocated with relative ease (relative being an important word here). There is a delightful BBC piece describing this.
Large Health Information System architectures need a similar flexibility and usability. Olympic buildings take up to seven years to plan and build, and have to find a new purpose after only 4 weeks of use. For healthcare information systems the planning and building should be shorter than that, but there is not even an initial four weeks that can be relied on where they will be needed and used in the way that was anticipated when planning and building began.
By Charlie McCay