Writing for content, document and knowledge management publication KMWorld, David Raths evaluates applications of health information technology, or HIT, in a set of case studies which he wraps up into a handy overview of the utility and potential of HIT and electronic medical records. Raths breaks HIT up into specific applications because, he writes, the very thing that loads HIT with so much potential – the byzantine complexity and built-in inefficiency of the American health care system – also serves as its biggest obstacle.
“The sheer complexity of the healthcare setting is off-putting,” says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal at CMS Watch covering enterprise content management technologies. “Joining up the clinical and administrative, not to mention the insurance part, is a spectacular challenge.”
A hospital has many small departments and people don’t tend to think outside their department, he says. Deploying enterprise content management solutions is difficult when there are so many interlinking elements in the healthcare chain, and nobody really owns the overall process from beginning to end. “There is usually not one unifying solution,” Pelz-Sharpe says, “but lots of departmental solutions.”
A few of the solutions Raths explores:
- Systems to integrate the paper, which will inevitably be part of any system, with EMR systems. Other systems will help integrate existing paper archives with EMRs.
- Systems that speed up the decision-making process and collaboration between physicians while better recording exactly why decisions were made.
- Administrative-side systems used by hospitals to navigate through health care’s financial maze.
- Cloud-based systems that envision health IT as a service.
