The good news, according to a research by Datamonitor, is that the healthcare industry will spend approximately $39.5 billion USD on information technology in 2008. Reports on IT spending in healthcare from Gartner are also favorable and predict that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2006 through 2011 should be around 5.2%. Above figures definitely paint a rosy picture for IT in the healthcare sector, however when compared to other industries like baking and retail, IT in healthcare is still far left behind. For instance, according to IDC, IT spending by U.S. banks was approximately $60 billion USD in 2007, almost double of the worldwide IT spending in healthcare in 2008. This certainly reflects that implementation of IT in healthcare has been a challenge but can also turn into a potential opportunity.
Health care industry has a reputation of being very labor-intensive. Most of the procedures are generally paper-based as blue-collar staff circulates paper medical charts all around in hospitals. There are several other challenges. Physicians who have been practicing for a long time are also not comfortable when it comes to using IT, making IT systems hard to sell. Moreover patient demographics on age is quite spread out and is tilted towards older patients, who are definitely not well trained to find relevant information from a bunch of IT systems such as a hospital website. IT also faces organizational resistance like doctors might feel that IT will reduce their power, as they will share all information with the hospital administration.
Up to what extent, processes can be inefficient in a hospital? The analysis may vary from hospitals to hospitals, however in a most common scenario, hospitals tend to have paper-based referral process. Hospital staff spends a lot of time to index these received referral documents and prioritize them. Doctor’s orders are also written on papers. Again, this process suffers from high risk of transcription errors. These orders are read and rewritten on requisitions forms, which are then sent to other departments such as lab, pharmacy or imaging departments. Above all, patient charts are physically transferred from one department to another, off course not a grand use of hospital staff.
Implementation of an IT project in any hospital can be categorized as a three-tier project. First tier consist of indentifying key processes, over those if IT is implemented will result in higher return on investment (ROI). Thus proper business process analysis should be carried over to identify insufficient processes and tweak them accordingly. Many healthcare providers have a chain of hospitals, thus, in this case it is important to standardize processes across all the chain hospitals wherever applicable. Second tier consists of initiating a change management project to educate and involve all stakeholders. This is a very important step in implementing IT projects as most of the failures occur as result of poor execution of the change management project. This is supposedly the most challenging aspect of any IT project in the healthcare industry and should be handled with utmost priority and sensitivity. Once the above two tiers are executed successfully, the third tier i.e. implementation of IT systems is straightforward step though there might be occasional hiccups.
Some of the common IT systems that hospitals should experiment are online referral system, physician order entry system, electronic medical chart, bar coding system, automated drug dispensing system and medical transcription system. It has been proven that successful implementation of above systems leads to huge dollar savings. Thus IT can positively help the healthcare industry to cut costs, increase efficiency, reduce waiting lists and invest the saved money into more valuable work such as medical research.
©2008 Awaneesh Shatmanyu
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