The top IT priorities for hospitals are to reduce medical errors and increase patient safety and to implement an electronic medical record, according to the recently released 17th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey of 205 healthcare IT executives. (Click here to download the 28-page report.) Survey respondents said that, over the next two years, their organizations will focus on adding technologies such as sign-on/identity management, bar coding, speech recognition, and personal digital assistants. Another big push is online patient scheduling; only 14% of respondents said patients can use the Web to make appointments, but 72% claim patients will have that option in two years. Lack of funding was the biggest barrier to moving IT initiatives forward for 18% of respondents, but three-quarters said their IT budgets would increase in the coming year. With a less than 10% growth in IT staff, 79% of the IT executives said they will outsource IT functions in the future.
