The healthcare systems are facing tremendous regulatory and market pressures for utilizing IT infrastructure to their full potentials for improving the quality of health care and for drawing investments. The Advisory Board Company's IT membership programs encourage partnership between IT leaders and other senior executives for developing sound IT strategies and governance for improving care delivery at the hospitals.
According to Advisory Board Company, health care information technology (HIT) has made a sweeping evolution over the past 50 years, from the invention of the database management system to the implementation of at least foundational-level electronic medical records at a majority of U.S. hospitals.
According to David E. Garets, an Executive Director who leads The Advisory Board Company's IT research and advisory services predicted that more HIT changes are awaited in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50 years combined.
It should be mentioned that Garets will be honored next week as one of the HIT industry's 50 most influential contributors over the past half-century by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). . Nominations for the award came from the full HIMSS membership of more than 33,000 professionals and voting was limited to current and past HIMSS board members.
“Most health care organizations are undergoing incredible transformations that are enabled by IT. I do not think anybody really fully understands what impact health care reform and the movement towards value-based payment systems are going to have on care delivery organizations. Accountable care cannot help but be significant and its success cannot help but be driven by an organization's ability to manage the information about its business and its patients. We are going to see unprecedented innovation and utilization of IT in the next decade,” Grates observed.
He said that data standardization and quality will play increasingly vital role in driving clinical behavior and documentation. Over the next ten years, HIT will involve much more than just electronic medical records, Grates predicted.
Effective remediation of ICD-10, substantial enhancement of clinical documentation tools, business intelligence, natural language processing, data warehousing, data mining, and data analysis will all also be critical components of an effective HIT approach in the current and coming health care environment, he further added.
Earlier this month, Advisory Board Company announced financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2010, the third quarter of its 2011 fiscal year. Acording to the company, revenue for the quarter increased 23.5 percent to $75.2 million, from $60.9 million in the quarter ended December 31, 2009.
Madhubanti Rudra is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Stefanie Mosca
