What Is Healthcare Information Technology

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Healthcare IT is moving more and more towards convergence. Storing, exchanging and accessing information is likely to continue to become increasingly centralized. Healthcare IT, if harnessed effectively, has the power to enhance the quality of medical care received by patients and make it more affordable. Regional and global trends can also be identified and predicted. Finally, the genetic revolution will not materialize unless supported by rapid developments in healthcare IT

The Future of Healthcare IT Technology

Over the past decade, information technology has permeated and changed the face of all segments of the healthcare industry. From medicinal practice to the ways in which physicians set appointments and from HMOs to medical education, every segment has evidenced the positive impact of information technology on quality, efficiency and cost of healthcare. IT technology has revolutionized the way the healthcare industry collects, stores, accesses and communicates information.

What is Healthcare Information Technology?

Healthcare IT technology refers to designing applications, computer networks and information databases responsible for the comprehensive management of healthcare information and ensuring its secure exchange among caregivers, medical educational institutes, research laboratories, insurance companies and patients. In the longer run, healthcare IT is expected to:

Improve the quality of healthcare being provided

Prevent medical errors

Lower medical costs

Enhance administrative efficiencies

Reduce paperwork

Expand access to information

Expand access to medical care

The one word that forms the core of the future of healthcare IT technology is "convergence." Let’s see how systems, institutes, people and mediums will converge.

Local Internal Healthcare IT Technology

Local internal healthcare IT technology has been widely accepted by hospitals, physicians and academic institutions. During the initial few years of the new millennium, hospitals used internally developed hospital management systems. However, this rapidly changed over the next few years and various commercially developed systems are either already in place or in the process of being refined. Apart from time saving and cost efficiency, these hospital management systems introduced several other advantages, including better adherence to healthcare guidelines, improved surveillance and a decline in medication errors. These hospital and healthcare management systems targeted areas such as billing, patient appointments, doctor’s availability and maintaining medical records.

The rising popularity of such systems indicates that electronic health records (EHR) will soon become a norm at hospitals. In the future, the EHRs would become more comprehensive. New and improved user interfaces are likely to be created, expediting the implementation of EHRs or Computerized Patient Records (CPR).

Internet-based Healthcare IT

With declining costs and rising assimilation of the Internet into the healthcare sector, data that was being maintained by each hospital individually began to be centralized. For instance, big hospitals like the Johns Hopkins Hospital collect and store information at a centralized location, which could then be accessed by the various branches. The Internet allowed a fast and inexpensive way to access and transmits healthcare information.

One growing concern that threatened to restrain the surge of electronic health records and the transmission of data over the Internet was data security. A staggering number of data thefts compelled the healthcare industry, which gathers sensitive information, to look towards IT to find ways of protecting patient privacy and confidentiality. One of the best solutions to the need for data security is data encryption. The advancements in healthcare information technology have made data encryption easy to implement and economical. Although significant progress has been made, further advancements in this direction seem to be forthcoming.

An area of growth over the next few years could be the Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) application, which electronically writes physician orders. This technology is currently being used by less than half of the hospitals in the US, which is the hub of healthcare IT development. The use of CPOE in ambulatory clinics is likely to rise in the near future. CPOE has great utility when used in combination with clinical decision support systems (CDSS). CDSS are interactive computer programs that link health observations with information on the subject in order to assist health professionals in their decision making tasks.

Another area of growth for healthcare IT technology would be remote patient monitoring. While hospitals are increasingly implementing remote patient monitoring technologies and the market for the same is growing, individual physicians have not as yet warmed up to the idea. This issue will be overcome when healthcare IT technology is able to link outcomes more closely with remuneration in this sphere.

The future of healthcare IT technology lies in the effectiveness, expense and safety of information sharing. Healthcare IT and Internet technologies hold great promise in achieving enhanced data sharing among healthcare providers, patients and insurance companies. While countries like the UK, Canada, Australia and France are endeavoring to creating personal health record infrastructures and implementing national health IT, the sharing of information is poised to overcome geographic boundaries in the future. This would be achieved by developments in Internet-based healthcare IT. One impact of this would be the existence of common websites that would maintain medical records of patients. This information may be accessible not only across hospitals, but across hospitals in different countries. These online sites would maintain a person’s medical history, from birth to the vaccinations received, from the surgeries undergone to a record of allergies. A user-friendly interface would help patients, physicians and other healthcare providers to compute and access all the necessary information. So, healthcare IT technology would ensure that individuals are able to access all their healthcare information in one place, so that they have a better understanding of their illness or health situation and use the same platform to communicate with caregivers, without the threat of data theft.

Over the next decade a sea change in healthcare is likely to be spearheaded by developments in IT and communication technologies. Remote monitoring and diagnosis will become more effective and common. This will result in increased transfer of information and communication among hospitals, physicians, clinics and patients as well as remote consultation and education becoming more and more widespread.

With more and more data being stored, analysis of this data would mark a gigantic leap in the field of preventive health. Analysis could show whether people with certain characteristics or from certain geographies are prone to particular conditions or diseases. Epidemics could also be predicted by the recorded spread of a disease.

Genetic Revolution

Healthcare IT technology will not only transform how medicine is practiced today, but also play a vital role in bringing about a complete paradigm shift. The next groundbreaking feat would be a genetic revolution, or the study of human genome sequencing in preventing, treating and curing diseases.

Genetic engineering would be able to determine a unique DNA signature for each individual, contributing significantly to overall health and wellbeing. Genetic or molecular diagnostics would play a significant role in linking genetic knowledge to medical care. A genetic test or genomic-based diagnostics would be enough to determine what ailments a person is prone to, a person’s physical strengths and vulnerabilities, the status of the current disease, how responsive a patient would be to particular drugs and cures and what specific treatment to follow. Accurate and timely information and the synthesis of this with genetic and medical research would result in the development of novel preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic tests and processes.

Information management would be critical in this sphere of development. Healthcare IT technology would be aimed at integrating laboratories, medical specialists, EHRs and CDSSs. The building of IT infrastructure in the realm of genetics will probably take a very long time to be developed and advancements may take place one small step at a time. This is because genetic engineering is highly complex and DNA sequencing is frightfully expensive. Also, what would really add value in genetic engineering is if data from various sources can be accessed and processed via a common/single interface.

The first step for healthcare IT technology in combining the various systems would be merging information from various laboratories where genetic tests are performed. Inter-institutional networks or hubs will need to be established in order to exchange information, since no one institute or hospital will be have comprehensive genetic data and knowledge.

This will form the base of developing standards for the industry. But for this, safety of data transfer has to be guaranteed by healthcare IT. The next step would be to link CDSSs to databases, such that decision making can be based on the latest genetic research and knowledge. While genetic knowledge would be shared by various institutes, data and information would span studies and test conducted across diverse organizations and patients would span geographies, the drugs and treatments would be personalized. This means that two people suffering from the same disease may receive different treatment and drugs, depending on their DNA structure.

Information technology would play a vital role in the planning, structuring and implementing needed to transform healthcare into this new era. Healthcare IT technology in the genetics field would have to be colossal in scope and developments in this regard may be slow and take place one step at a time.

Much of the healthcare IT technology being used today is still immature and the methods of data storing, transfer and accessing information by hospitals, physicians and clinicians are still crude. However, rapid progress is being made. With the development in healthcare IT technology and increased convergence, we could hope to see:

Improved medical care

The early detection of outbreaks of an infectious disease across a region

Lower medical costs

Remote monitoring of health

Comprehensive records for chronic disease management

Linking outcomes to fees