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Customer Experience and Design

How the Healthcare CIO Saves Lives: #1 Ensures Care is Given at the Correct Time

When we think of a Health IT project like Health Information Exchange, many focus on the technology-oriented aspects of designing, selecting, implementing, and managing a technology project. However, Health IT should ultimately be driven by the clinical goal of ensuring that the appropriate level of care is provided to patients in a timely manner. By connecting all of the disparate parts of a healthcare system, the Healthcare CIO is instrumental in ensuring the timeliness of this care.

The true clinical goals include:

Enable clinicians in their care processes: By providing clinicians with longitudinal patient healthcare data, physicians will be able to see all healthcare-related services that have been provided, even if that physician was not the individual that delivered that care. In addition, physicians can review healthcare results including laboratory results and prescribed medications. Physicians can also collaborate on the same patient data to improve outcomes.

Improving the quality of care for patients across a given condition: This would include quality outcomes around selected disease states as well as specific geographic, ethnic, and gender factors to better target and deliver specific healthcare education and associated services.

Reduce costs associated with providing quality care: Though one of the most important aspects of Health IT is improved quality of care for patients, controlling and being aware of the cost of the care is just as important. By including costs in the exchange of clinical information both healthcare systems and government agencies can begin to understand the correlation between the quality of care and the costs associated with that care. By understanding what was the cost of care, better clinical guidelines and programs can be established to balance cost with better clinical outcomes.

Ensure that personal information remains protected: As more and more clinical information is put into an electronic format, many citizens and patients worry about how this information is protected from unauthorized access. Even with the HIPAA security rules and regulations, healthcare systems, and state government agencies must ensure that as EHR and HIE go live, these solutions provides the necessary protection and access controls to build trust and confidence in those that patients that participate.

A successful Health IT project must be secure, accurate, dependable, appropriate, and responsive to the needs of the users of clinical information to ensure that the appropriate care is delivered. The technology selected should be supportive of these crucial clinical goals rather than become the overriding focus of IT implementation. When this is achieved, then Health IT can also achieve the ultimate goal of delivering important care at the appropriate time can become a reality.

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