STC Blog
Will Health IT Improve Outcomes?Mike Popovich - STC CEO
The new order in health care transformation has energized the health care information technology business. This is both good and bad. The good: change, cost, innovation, call to action, and outcomes – all come to mind. The bad: change, cost, innovation, call to action, and outcomes. It is a mirror effect or perhaps more appropriately, the competing angel and devil in your ear.
Health IT is touted as one solution to provide improved patient care, determine disease treatment best practices, and manage the economics. Health IT is capable of supporting these objectives but only if deployed and placed efficiently into day to day clinical care operations.
Will the change, cost, innovation, and call to action improve patient care? The devil says no and the angel says of course. Which one gets our ear? It will be the one with the facts. Facts gathered from the value of new data now available through implementation of HIT on populations of patients. It is the improvement in patient populations as measured by evaluating specific programs targeting specific diseases.
In epidemiological terms, “outcomes” is the key word. Will Health IT improve outcomes? Our angel says yes. How will we know – that is a primary role of the public health professional. If implementation of your HIT effort includes, from the beginning, the technical components to support public health, you will in fact have an angel on your side.
Posted on: May 6, 2010 | Links: Facebook |
