Adoption of health information technology (HIT), including electronic health records, is critical to comprehensive health care reform. Integrated delivery systems like Geisinger Health, Intermountain Healthcare, and Kaiser Permanente have shown the utility of HIT by realizing internal savings and providing improved care with their use of electronic health records.

Required Reading

The Wireless Future of Health IT
Event
March 23, 2009

HEALTH IT: An Investment Worth
Making
New Health Dialogue
Jan. 22, 2009

Read more on this issue at our blog:
New Health Dialogue
Yet even as health professionals around the world and other professions in the U.S. have moved to information technology, the American health sector lags behind, with a small fraction of providers using HIT.

HIT can improve patient care by providing physicians with comprehensive, accessible records on each patient and clinical decision-making support, including information gleaned from comparative effectiveness research.

Organized, accessible electronic databases (with stringent privacy protections) can also open up an enormous amount of previously unavailable data for research into public health and comparative effectiveness.