Friday, July 27th, 2012
Keith Figlioli, senior vice president of healthcare informatics with the Premier healthcare alliance, takes a look at the future of healthcare IT in a recent article in Forbes.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
If retailers like Target operated without regard to interoperability and focused on one enabling technology, they would only have implemented point of sale systems that were proprietary to each individual store.
But that’s not how things work. Instead, Target has a central system where all data is analyzed and pushed back out to support day-to-day operations, mining purchasing data, tying it to specific individuals and using algorithms to predict future outcomes. They are so good at this that Target can predict which shoppers are pregnant, and customize circulars to feature items specific to that new mom, including diapers, hand sanitizers, lotions, etc.
Imagine this in healthcare – if HIT were able to predict future health events and enable doctors to make better, more customized decisions before a patient arrived complaining of a problem. EHR alone can’t do that. But built the right way, HIT could consist of data warehouses that catalog the evidence, and applications that provide relevant content on demand to support a range of clinical decisions, engage providers through their choices, make smart predictions and access others’ work automatically without tons of custom programming.
Figlioli explains what an ideal HIT system should look like. To read more, click here.
Then let us know what you think about the future of healthcare IT.
