Health Information Technology and Specialized Professionals

Health Information Technology and Specialized Professionals

Introduction

The health care system in the United States is complex and highly fragmented with large volume of transactions, need for evidence based medicine and complex information management (Chaudhry et al., 2006). The main objective of any health care provider is to provide quality of care while minimizing cost. The two most challenging task in providing quality of care and controlling health care costs are:

Patient Safety: The aim of any health care system is to ensure patient safety. In their report “To Err is Human”, the IOM has reported that 44,000 – 98,000 people die each year due to medical or drug errors (IOM, 1999). Beyond their cost in human lives, preventable medical errors exact other significant tolls. These include the expense of additional care necessitated by the errors, lost income and household productivity, and disability. They have been estimated to result in total costs between $17 billion and $29 billion per year in hospitals nationwide.

Patient satisfaction: Patient satisfaction is the ultimate goal of any health care provider. To achieve this goal health care provider need to make their business and clinical processes efficient (Callender et al., 2007). Efficiency is the ability to function in a way that minimized usage of resources while improving quality of services. The current US health care system is hardly efficient with large wait times, delay in treatments, wastage of resources, and inefficient information management and transfer. All these can lead to patient discomfort and increased health care costs.

Health Information technology

Health care experts, policymakers, payers and consumers consider health information technology (HIT) to be critical in transforming the health care industry (Chaudhry et al., 2006). HIT is the implementation of information technology to both business and clinical processes of the health care system. We live in the tech age where...