The 2010 American Hospital Association Environmental Scan provides insight and information about market forces that have a high probability of affecting the health care field.
Below is the complete document from http://www.hhnmag.com/ with the summary of the Information Technology & E-Health section below.
Information Technology & E-Health
- The projected IT priorities of hospitals for the next two years are: inpatient clinical information systems (40 percent), the reduction of medical errors and the promotion of patient safety (39 percent), EMR implementation (38 percent), and connecting the hospital with remote environments (30 percent).
- Hospitals will make significant investments in their systems for measuring and reporting clinical outcomes over the next two years, according to a survey of managers from more than 50 U.S. health systems conducted by Health Care Management Insight. Only 12 percent report that substantial detail is available and easy to analyze for clinical process data and 21 percent for clinical outcomes data. By contrast, 39 percent of hospitals represented in the survey say they can easily analyze detailed data about departmental financial performance. About 80 percent of respondents said departmental financial performance data is available to most managers. The distribution of clinical process and outcomes reports is limited to a few managers at about 42 percent of hospitals.
- The most significant barriers to implementing IT were: lack of financial support (26 percent), lack of staffing resources (13 percent) and vendors' inability to effectively deliver product (12 percent).
- Implementing new technology is costly to hospitals, however, the benefits—both financial and nonfinancial—accrue primarily to payers and patients.
- The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has a number of goals, one of which is to reduce long-term costs by modernizing health care through the use of information technology. To drive adoption of electronic health records by 2015, the federal government will invest $36 billion in Medicare and Medicaid providers and through government agencies between 2010 and 2017. The funding will go to providers that show meaningful use government-certified systems. Analysis shows that an average 500-bed hospital would receive an average of $6.1 million in incentives.
- Many Americans think that greater access to information would improve health care quality. Seventy-four percent say the quality of the medical care they receive would improve if they had access to more information about the success of different treatment options. Thirty-five percent indicate that quality would improve if they knew the full price of the health care services they receive, not just what they pay.
