An IT department plays a tremendous role in any modern healthcare organization, as does the IT for healthcare in general. According to Shi and Singh (2019), “IT departments in health care organizations play a critical role in decisions to adopt new information technologies, to improve health care delivery, increase organizational efficiency, and comply with various laws and regulations.” Regarding specific activities and systems, IT in healthcare is responsible for systems that collect, store, share, structure, and monitor information, including financial systems, pharmacy data systems, medical record systems, and others. The mentioned systems and processes fall into three broad categories: clinical and administrative information systems and decision support systems (Shi & Singh, 2019). The first two categories are necessary to facilitate patient care delivery and administration activities, respectively. Decision support systems provide the required information and analysis to improve managerial and clinical decision-making processes. These include forecasting the volumes of work, optimizing healthcare professionals’ schedules, and utilizing individual patient data to develop improved treatments.
Regarding the impacts on patients, they can be identified all across the framework. Information technologies are an essential resource in the structure of healthcare. Moreover, it is a resource that affects other resources within the system – for instance, the implementation of healthcare IT can improve the performance of healthcare specialists. Clinical information systems can support the decisions that healthcare professionals make on an individual level, and the overall workflow of these specialists can be optimized with the help of managerial decision support systems. Healthcare IT positively affects even the prospects of Health Service Financing, as IT systems help control financial flows, billing, and create reports.
On the Processes level, the effect of healthcare IT is incomparable – it improves all sorts of care, including outpatient, inpatient, managed, and long-term care. Regardless of the type, any care implies collecting data about patients. IT systems can use this data to optimize care for each patient individually, which will increase the chances of recovery and reduce the likelihood of medical errors and the time necessary for recovery. Furthermore, another positive effect of health IT is less obvious, yet no less critical – optimization of all managerial, administrative, and financial processes results in the reduction of time for respective procedures. This means that patients can get help sooner, and the system overall can adapt to any changes in external and internal circumstances quicker, which can save lives in the end.
Finally, regarding the Outcomes, all three of them, including cost, access, and quality, are affected directly by healthcare IT. Firstly, as was demonstrated before, the correct implementation of IT solutions in healthcare can increase the quality of services due to the individual approach and general optimization of processes. The costs for healthcare organizations can also be reduced due to the use of information technology – standardization of information, electronic transferability and access, automatization of accounting, and other processes all result in optimization. Such optimization allows for a cut-off of unnecessary costs associated with extra time or effort spent on these tasks. Subsequently, this organizational level cost decrease can be projected to patients’ prices, which can also be reduced. Finally, I believe that the impact on access will not be as significant; however, a general efficiency rise can lead to improvements in access due to changes in costs and volumes of medical services. Initially, I had assumed that the impacts of IT on healthcare are significant, as IT is vital to the infrastructure of the modern world. Therefore, my thoughts on this subject did not change dramatically, but I learned a lot regarding the importance of healthcare IT.
Reference
Shi, L., & Singh, D.A. (2019). Delivering healthcare in America: A systems approach (7th Ed.). Jones and Bartlett Learning.