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Healthcare

Standards & interoperability priority for Health IT execs

By Jianggan Li | 16 October 2008

A new survey on using HIT systems to support care management interventions highlights the need for many HIT applications to offer more functionality, standardisation and interoperability to optimise clinical and financial outcomes for patients.

The respondents use a variety of different HIT platforms in use with different orientations and attributes. The survey found that medical management organisations appear to implement and use a number of approaches, both developed in house and supplied by vendors, to optimise workflows. For instance, sixty-four per cent of the respondents report using multiple systems in contrast to 17 per cent who rely on only one system.

Not surprisingly, just 20 per cent indicated that their system is fully integrated and interoperable with other external IT applications.

The survey findings support two issues which often emerge in thought leader discussions: the lack of standardised IT platforms currently available that support the care management process; and the need to define better ways to popularise successful strategies.

TCS Healthcare Technologies, which conducted the survey, observed that although the practice of nursing and medicine has been transformed with the advent and adoption of electronics and computers, the application of health IT systems as a tool to support care management is still evolving.

As a result, leveraging technology to improve medical management intervention strategies should remain a high priority in terms of both public health and reduced medical costs.

Satisfaction levels of experiences with care management software applications and EMR systems seem to be mixed among the respondents, with only 22 per cent saying that their care management software applications allow their clinicians to spend more time interacting with patients.

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