HHS HIT Website

Today I came across what someone called a new Health and Human Services (HHS) health information technology (HIT) website. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the same graphic designer and web developer that have been doing such a fine job with the various websites that Obama has been putting up.

I find the first page interesting since it has HHS asserting the following:
Health information technology (Health IT) allows comprehensive management of medical information and its secure exchange between health care consumers and providers. Broad use of health IT will:

  • Improve health care quality
  • Prevent medical errors
  • Reduce health care costs
  • Increase administrative efficiencies
  • Decrease paperwork
  • Expand access to affordable care

Interoperable health IT will improve individual patient care. It will also bring many public health benefits including:

  • Early detection of infectious disease outbreaks around the country
  • Improved tracking of chronic disease management
  • Evaluation of health care based on value enabled by the collection of de-identified price and quality information that can be compared.

I wish that each of these bullet points had links to all of the research that shows these are indeed the outcomes of HIT. This should include the research that argues against HIT being able to solve these problems. That would turn the list into an invaluable resource on the benefits and challenges of HIT.

I’m going to need to take some time to look at the rest of the site. However, the link that said “Standards and Certifications” certainly caught my eye and is guaranteed to be a future blog post.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • Wow, what tech do THEY have — most of my clients can’t even get denominator (how many patients. . . ) information accurately and on time!

  • While you are writing about the possible negative effects of IT on your computer, please take time to consider the paperwork, professionals, departments, agencies, and pharamcist’s a person goes through in a lifetime.
    I think Obama is completely on target with getting everything into one place and up-to-date (and regulated).
    Of course you could have hand written this information (blog) to each person who read it yourself, but who would you have known to adress it too? In fact would you even have written it on a single peice of paper that could only be handed around, stored or posted?
    Please ponder the benefits of IT when you turn your computer off tonight.
    Unless of course the whole of the USA’s electric grid goes out permanently… Then I would’nt have to re-pay my student or my mortgage!…

  • Oh Sally. Don’t be silly. I LOVE technology and I am a huge fan of HIT and specifically EMR. That’s why I find it so unfortunate that the EMR stimulus has actually had a damning effect in regards to EMR adoption. EMR is definitely the future of healthcare. We’ll just see if long term the EMR stimulus money and Obama’s policy have a good or a bad effect on EMR adoption.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories