About: Momentum for HIT

The Role of Health Information Technology in Addressing our Nation's Most Pressing Healthcare Challenges

Concerns about quality, safety, and rising costs in healthcare have driven the federal government and national and local leaders alike to look for solutions to the challenges of our nation’s healthcare system.

U.S. adults receive about half of recommended healthcare services. Despite documented benefits of timely preventive care, a Commonwealth Fund-sponsored U.S. Scorecard on Health System Performance indicates that barely half of adults (49 percent) receive preventive and screening tests according to guidelines.

Poor quality translates into higher costs. According to the same Commonwealth Fund report, the current gap between national average rates of diabetes and blood pressure control and rates achieved by the top ten percent of health plans translates into an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 preventable deaths and $1 to $2 billion in avoidable medical costs.

In addition, chronic disease is a growing problem in the United States. More than 125 million Americans had at least one chronic care condition in 2000, and this number is expected to grow to 157 million by the year 2020. As baby boomers continue to age, the number of individuals living with chronic conditions will continue to grow. People with chronic conditions drive a majority of healthcare spending in the U.S., accounting for 78 percent of all health care spending in 1998. Seventy-six percent of all hospital admissions are attributable to people with chronic conditions. And people with chronic conditions account for 88 percent of all prescriptions filled and 72 percent of all physician visits.

In a country where healthcare spending is 16 percent of the gross domestic product, and much higher than other industrialized countries, leading employers tell us that the United States is losing its competitiveness on the global market. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), healthcare spending per capita in Switzerland—the next most costly OECD country—is only 68 percent of that in the U.S.; in Canada, it is only 57 percent; and in the median OECD country it is less than 44 percent of the U.S. level.

The U.S. healthcare system is not well equipped to address these growing challenges. Increasingly, leaders both within the public and private sectors are focused on breaking down barriers to higher quality, safer, more efficient health care through the introduction of several new strategies including changing the way we pay for healthcare, increased focus on transparency, increased focus on consumer engagement and on health IT, given its critical and demonstrated role in improving health and healthcare.

In fact, the Commonwealth Fund’s recent survey of healthcare opinion leaders released in July 2007 showed that 67 % of health care opinion leaders thought the acceleration of health IT would be very effective or effective in improving quality and safety in healthcare.
The Role of Information Technology in Healthcare

Because of the highly fragmented nature of the U.S. healthcare system, information about the patient is stored in a variety of locations largely in paper-based forms and therefore cannot easily be accessed. As a result, clinicians often do not have comprehensive information about the patient when and where it is needed most—at the point of care, and those responsible for managing and improving the health of populations do not have all the information they need to measure progress and facilitate response and improvement.

Those responsible for public health often don’t have timely access to information that supports monitoring, detection, and response to hazards and threats. Those responsible for assuring the safety of pharmaceuticals and devices don’t have ready access to information to support surveillance and detection of safety issues. In addition, those who are driving new research don’t have effective access to the information they need to support the creation of both improved evidence-based guidelines and new, more effective therapies to improve health and healthcare for Americans. Finally, and most importantly, consumers don’t have access to information that is needed to manage their own health and navigate an increasingly complex healthcare system.

Interoperable health IT and health information exchange—or the mobilization of clinical information electronically—facilitates access to and retrieval of clinical data, privately and securely, among different entities involved in the care delivery system, to provide safer, more timely, efficient, effective, equitable, patient-centered care.