Wall Street Journal Examines Health Care Industry's Adoption Of Information Technology

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Also Included In: Primary Care / General Practice;  Public Health
Article Date: 21 Oct 2008 - 9:00 PDT

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The U.S. health care industry "is about to undergo a global revolution driven by a force it can no longer resist: information technology," the Wall Street Journal reports.

According to the Journal, physicians and hospitals "have long been quick to adopt breakthrough technology in medical devices, procedures and treatments," but "far less attention has focused on innovations in networking and communications" in part because of "concerns about breaches in security and patient privacy and because health care until recently was a service always performed locally and in person." However, "that is about to change," the Journal reports.

"Outsourcing and offshoring of medical and nonmedical services will increase, providing more efficient health care at the most cost-effective rates; systems integrations will allow more medical records to be transferred swiftly and securely; efforts to monitor the safety of medicines will gain global access to data; and professionals and patients will find authoritative and up-to-date information on every specialty online," according to the Journal. In the future, "there will be three often overlapping modes of delivering health care services: services performed in person by humans, services that can be performed by people at a remote location, and services performed by computers without direct human involvement," according to the Journal.

Such "changes won't come quickly" and will face "plenty of obstacles" as institutions and networks reach across borders and encounter different laws as well as technical standards," but health care "organizations that don't join in the coming changes will incur higher costs and less integration," both of which "will make them less competitive in the global health care marketplace" (Gupta, Wall Street Journal, 10/20).

A related Journal video is available online.

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