Daniel Nelson Prof. Kemelmahker IT 3503 31 January 2018 The Healthcare Information Technology field is one of the fastest growing segments in today’s workforce and is precisely why I am pursuing this career. There are many paths to choose within this broad topic, so today, I will outline the trends, the current and developing skills required, skills that the top performers in the industry possess, and will share the findings of my self-reflection and the areas needed for me to improve upon, expand my knowledge, and work toward fine tuning existing skills. The current trends in the HIT (Healthcare Information Technology) are: Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs)/Mobile Access, Data Mining/Analytics, and Privacy. …show more content…
Epic and Cerner are companies which have lead in this space for many years, but are struggling to maintain its market share in this fast-growing area. They were both pioneers, but stalled in the innovation and ability to be nimble across all markets. They are working hard to come up with better, faster, more meaningful solutions. Because the new payment methodology outlined and required under the MACRA legislation, providers MUST have electronic health records that are linked between all physician practices, pharmacies, hospitals, ancillary providers to accurately record each patient encounter, services rendered, outcomes, lab results, etc. Without EHR, provider systems will not be successful under MACRA and will not maximize their reimbursements from CMS; which historically, are already very low, so to take further reductions because they cannot comply with the requirements, would lead to more hospital bought physician practices, which ultimately drives higher costs to the members, employers, insurers, and the Government …show more content…
This field is highly sought by health systems and health insurance companies. They have invested heavily in these areas and critical to their success. Development of data warehouses and a data mining platform helps to sort through millions of health records and finding a needle in a haystack basically. If a health insurance company needs to identify how many members have diabetes for example, and they have a strong platform and informatics team to run the inputs, and it could pull all the members from the data warehouse by either a diagnosis found via ICD 10 code, procedure code found via CPT code, lab value of high glucose found from a supplemental data feed from the provider office, a filled prescription of a statin found by claim paid; the list goes on and the possibilities are endless. Clearly, this is an area that has and will continue to experience explosive growth and the area that I am most interested in pursuing as a