Advancing Information Technology in Health Care

 The Health Care Industry Represents a major part of the U.S. Economy In 2007 total U.S. health care spending comprised 16% of the country’s GDP, amounting to $2.3 trillion  According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, approximately 20% of health care expenditure, some $460 billion in 2007, was dedicated to the tasks of processing, storing, and disseminating information’s, signifying the importance of these tasks in health care delivery. Infect, over the past ten years health care organizations have increasingly adopted information systems to improve numerous business processes such as patient scheduling, laboratory reporting, medical record keeping, billing, and accounting. Even though information systems have become more commonplace in health care, many opportunities to improve efficiency, productivity, and quality remain.

 A number of factors, ranging from limited resources to heavy government regulation, contribute to the slow adoption of information systems by health care organizations. One of the greatest obstacles preventing large scale health care IT initiatives is the nature of the industry itself. From an information systems perspective, health care lacks industry standards at the most basic levels.

 The lack of standards can be attributed in large part to a mostly fragmented industry comprised of a number of local organizations. In addition, for many health care systems, a clear return on investment is difficult to find. Improvements in productivity can be documented for certain systems, such as those dealing with billing and inventory. There is typically a time lag between when the technology investment is made and when productivity and financial gains are realized. However, clinical systems typically result in hard to measure improvements such as an increase in quality of care rather than a directly measurable decrease in the cost of providing care. The end result is that most information system currently used in health care organizations are designed to support ancillary services  (such as laboratory reporting, logistics and inventory management, billing, and medical records). They do not serve the overarching process of providing patient care. As a result, while health care organizations accrue some benefits under the current state, many additional opportunities abound.

 A Push into the 21^st Century

 The use of IT to improve the productivity and efficiency of health care delivery continues to be a hotly debated topic. IT advocates such as Dr. David Br@iler, the former national coordinator of Health Information technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, point out that seemingly “simple” strategic can yield tremendous benefits. One example espoused by Dr. Br@iler involves providing each individual in the U.S. an electronic health record and then creation a linked network across which these records. Can be assessed  Dr. Br@iler asserts that such an initiative has the potential to eliminate as much as $600 billion per year in costs.

 A recent evaluation reported a median revenue increase of $49,916 per full-time physician after operating costs were attributed to EMR-associated efficiency gains from the eliminations of paper charts, as well as transcription savings, better charge capturing, and reduced billing errors. Numerous reports by the National Academy of Science have identified the transformative potential of information technology to control costs and improve outcome in health care.