Delivery of high-quality health care is driving investments in clinical technology, including electronic medical records (EMR) and technology that reduces medical errors, such as computerized practitioner order entry (CPOE), suggest results of the 19th annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) leadership survey. Medicare cutbacks and managed care fee reductions are creating uncertainty about the ability to fund such investments, the survey also reveals. Complete results of the survey were presented Feb. 25 at the 2008 Annual HIMSS conference.
According to the 300 healthcare IT professionals who participated in the survey, investments in EMR technology will be the top IT priority at their organization in the next two years. With one in four healthcare IT professionals acknowledging their organization suffered a security breach last year, identity management and security technologies were two of the top three technologies respondents said they planned to implement for the first time in the next two years. The top three technology areas identified were identity management (45 percent), radio frequency identification technology (43 percent), and security technologies (42 percent). These investments are on top of already strong use of security technologies such as firewalls (in place at 98 percent of respondent’s facilities), user access controls (83 percent), and audit logs of each access to patient health records (81 percent). Access the report.
