Health Information Technology In Healthcare

Technology and Healthcare
Norberto S. Hernandez
Western Governors University

In many cases in all healthcare settings, the times of paper charting are coming to a close. Many facilities, agencies and offices are moving towards electronic medical records and electronic charting. This allows for swifter documentation and allows for the patient’s medical record being able to be accessed by all and any clinicians or physicians to access the patient record at any given time. This helps with being able to read nurses notes, progress notes, and reports not only from radiology but lab reports that are pertinent to allow for better patient care and more effective treatments. As healthcare costs are rising, quality of
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act of 2009 provides monetary incentives for organizations that adopt an electronic medical record system for their organizations to help improve the quality of the healthcare system.

Healthcare organizations have begun to realize that errors are costly and have begun to move towards computerized management systems to increase and improve the quality of care a patient receives. Having a computerized management system, is not only beneficial to the patient and his care but to the organizations staff. It improves the quality of care by allowing for secured accessibility to the patient chart by all departments and clinicians working with a particular patient from multiple locations within the healthcare system which leads to quick real time reporting and results. In turn this allows for clinicians to better attend to patients and their needs for care. Electronic records are much more efficient not only to physicians but to front line clinicians, by allowing the access to previous records for review
Even though The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act of 2009 provides monetary incentives for organizations that adopt an electronic medical record system for their organizations to help improve the quality of the healthcare system, on average, costs both increase and decrease depending on the organization (McBride, 2012). Since cost containment is important to any healthcare organization, cost are reduced in the area of productivity and better quality or care by increasing the productivity of the clinicians and the increase in patient to clinician ratio and by not having to perform unnecessary procedures, labs, and diagnostics that often time are at cost for the hospital. This will include hospital based infections and wounds that the hospital would have to pay for, but with a better quality of care these areas of concern are reduced and the healthcare organization can reduce cost. On the other hand, even though cost of care will decrease the cost will also increase in other areas for instance the maintenance of the care management system will become an added cost to the healthcare organization. Within this area the cost of maintenance, acquiring computers or handheld devices, software updates, and storage for data become an added cost and at times at a lofty price