Health IT

 Health IT (health information technology) is the area of IT involving the design, development, creation, use and maintenance of information systems for the healthcare industry. Automated and interoperable healthcare information systems will continue to improve medical care and public health, lower costs, increase efficiency, reduce errors and improve patient satisfaction, while also optimizing reimbursement for ambulatory and inpatient healthcare providers.

Today, the importance of health IT results from the combination of evolving technology and changing government policies that influence the quality of patient care. Modern health IT received a boost when President George W. Bush introduced incentives for hospitals to adopt electronic health record (EHR) systems, and that march has continued with Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, showing that health IT enjoys general bipartisan support.

Types of health information technology

The EHR is the central component of the health IT infrastructure. An EHR, or electronic medical record (EMR), is a person's official, digital health record and is shared among multiple healthcare providers and agencies. Other key elements of the health IT infrastructure are the personal health record (PHR), which is a person's self-maintained health record, and the health information exchange (HIE), a health data clearinghouse or a group of healthcare organizations that enter into an interoperability pact and agree to share data between their various health IT systems. Thanks to smartphones and other mobile devices, in the coming years, PHRs will grow in popularity as consumers become more comfortable with their digital health information. Thus, PHRs will need to integrate further with EHR technology.

As a result of the mountain of patient information that healthcare organizations now sit on, data analytics has taken a greater role in day-to-day operations. The ability to aggregate patient information, analyze it and then base treatments on the results fits in well with population health management (PHM) and value-based healthcare. Artificial intelligence will take analytics to a higher level, although, as of 2018, AI is not relied upon for diagnoses. Analytics also raises the question of who owns the data: the patient, the healthcare organization or the vendor that produced the analytics software? Trends in healthcare point to patients ultimately becoming the owners.

There are other important health IT technologies beyond EHRs. Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and vendor-neutral archives (VNAs) are two widely used types of health IT that help healthcare professionals store and manage patients' medical images. In the past, radiology departments have been the primary repositories of medical images, but PACS and VNAs are integrating radiology into the main hospital workflow. And other specialties, such as cardiology and neurology, have also become large-scale producers of clinical images. In some instances, VNAs have been installed as a way to merge imaging data stored in separate departments' image banks in a multifacility healthcare system.

Security and privacy

HIPAA's security and privacy rules have long guided healthcare organizations to provide patients access to their medical records, while also safeguarding that information.

Such goals have taken on greater urgency given that data breaches and malware attacks have scourged the healthcare industry since 2010. Nearly 5.6 million patients had their records breached in 2017, and although the amount of patient data breaches dropped that year, malware and ransomware attacks on healthcare sites increased, according to a 2018 report from Protenus, a health IT privacy and security firm.

In response, traditional health IT systems now often integrate with data security and cybersecurity technology. Worker education is also part of the solution, as human errors can lead to data breaches.

Benefits of health information technology

While some critics say EHRs have led to clinicians spending more time entering data than conversing with patients and produced cumbersome federal regulations, there is broad consensus on the benefits of health IT. These advantages include:

• the ability to use data analytics and big data to effectively manage population health management programs and reduce the incidence of expensive chronic health conditions;
• the use of cognitive computing and analytics to perform precision medicine (PM) tailored to individual patients;
• the ability to share health data among academic researchers to develop new medical therapies and drugs; and
• the rights of patients to obtain and use their own health data and collaborate in their own care with clinicians.