Summary
The Congressional Budget Office has concluded the use of health IT will result in cost savings as a result of a reduction in medical errors and redundant medical testing. For this to occur, health IT must have both security and clinical relevancy for both physicians and patients alike to embrace its usefulness. Companies which will be likely to prosper as a result of a successful health IT implementation include Google and MSN who are actively pursuing platforms to support health IT.
Analysis
The current environment of healthcare has seen fragmentation of patient medical information without health IT. Issues surrounding a patient's ability to recall their own health history and even memorize the medicines which they are taking have been identified as a potential source of error when a patient transfers care from one medical provider to another. Even correspondence between medical providers after a referral has been made can occasionally be incomplete. These deficits can result in complications and increased costs both from a health and economic standpoint.
Health IT has long been proposed as a potential tool to influence the rising costs of healthcare. Proponents cite a reduction of medical errors and elimination of redundant testing through the ability to seamlessly transmit medical information from patient to medical provider and medical provider to medical provider. The resultant cost savings is manifested in the prevention of medical error related complications and optimization of laboratory and radiographic testing.
For successful implementation to occur, health IT must overcome barriers related to both patient and physician acceptance of these platforms. With regard to patients, privacy remains paramount in the exchange of information. As a corollary, tampering of personal health information, or loss of security will result in long-term failure of this tool. From the physician perspective, the ability to abstract important clinical information to be used in medical decisionmaking must also be carefully developed. A survey done from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation concluded that only 24% of physicians would utilize health IT at its current state of functionality. This suggests inadequacies not only in the capabilities of current platforms, but also the need for more user-friendly navigation strategies for universal acceptance.
Nevertheless, health IT represents a promising tool for health cost savings. Companies, such as Google and MSN will be poised to benefit from this trend, as they endeavor to create an infrastructure designed to propogate health IT.
