HIT In Healthcare Essay

The U.S. health care is plagued with inefficiencies and poor quality even though 1.7 trillion dollars is invested annually into healthcare. But by using IT in healthcare can increase the cost saving by adopting an HIT or Health Information Technology system. An HIT or Health Information Technology system is a group of data sources that includes a patient electronic medical records, decision support systems, and computerized physician order entry for medications (RAND Corporation, 2005). If hospitals and doctor office adopt an HIT, it can maximize the saving for both inpatient and outpatient care by $77 billion per year (RAND Corporation, 2005). Most of the saving will come from reduced hospital stays, reduced administrative time, and more efficient drug utilization. An HIT could increase savings on medications by reducing or eliminating the 200,000 adverse drug events that happen each year and this could save $1 billion dollars annually (RAND Corporation, 2005). The largest savings will be generated by the bigger hospitals that have more than 100 beds.

These HIE systems share patient records in doctor offices and hospitals through IT companies like IBM and GE. This is a potential issue with privacy because there is no regulation requiring that a patient is notified when their records are shared through these exchanges (Dearen, 2012). With the rapid changes to this new HIE could uncover millions of medical records to profit-seeking companies or law enforcement without the patient knowing, even worse to cyber criminals. According to Jason Dearen the author of The rising risk of electronic medical records, “Once a patient medical information is placed into an exchange, there is little to no control on who can access it among the thousands of employees that work in the hospital to third-party vendors that are hired to manage the HIE systems” (Dearen,