“The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), passed in March 2009, allocated nearly $20 billion to invest in new health care information technology (HCIT) over the next couple of years. Such investment could go a long way towards improving the operation of the information-intensive health care system, but if invested in the kinds of information technology that characterize most of today’s deployments, such efforts will do little to help advance a vision of 21st century health care that is safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable.
Under the auspices of a National Research Council project to examine current needs in HCIT, we visited health care institutions around the country known for their leadership in the use of information technology to learn what does and does not work. These “best-of-breed” institutions should be praised for their accomplishments, and we saw many individual successes. Nevertheless, what we learned in these visits very clearly demonstrated the limitations of today’s notions about HCIT.”
Article
William W. Stead, Herbert S. Lin, NGC, 23 February 2010
