Healthcare Bill To Challenge IT Health?
Posted by Jeff Papows on Fri, Mar 26, 2010 @ 11:16 AM
Whether you’re for or against healthcare reform, you have to admit it’s going to cause major shifts that will directly impact IT. Of course, this doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s even remotely involved in managing the infrastructure of a healthcare or health-related organization.
For years, the healthcare industry has been dealing with a somewhat late arrival to IT adoption with regard to building and sustaining infrastructures. And this certainly isn't a knock on the healthcare industry as a whole. It's just that in order to get a full view of all activities in a healthcare organization requires a complex IT infrastructure that needs to support and connect all of the various departments and people in the patient life cycle.
For example, a patient who enters the emergency room for a short visit can easily interact with admissions, the HMO, x-rays, doctors, nurses, and the pharmacist before the information is aggregated and linked to billing and insurance. Now multiply this complexity by the fact that the average emergency room in the United States sees 82 patients per day.
Now when you add in new government regulations -- like we saw with HIPAA a few years ago -- the massive IT undertaking required to adhere to the new healthcare reform can't be understated.
Even for those organizations like Kaiser Permanente and Independence Blue Cross that have built sound IT infrastructures that are based on a proactive approach to IT governance, the new regulations are going to require significant investments of time from both the business and IT groups.
On the upside, however, is the opportunity for the healthcare industry to leapfrog other industries and show how to simplify these complex back-end systems so that the end user -- in this case, the patients -- do not have their care interrupted due to shoddy IT practices.
Healthcare is certainly one area where preventative measures, including IT governance, can go a long way, especially as new government mandates kick in.