Digital Quality of Life: Health Care

Abstract

From rural India to state of-the-art hospitals in the United States, information technology (IT) is transforming and revolutionizing health care. Health care practitioners focus increasingly not just on doing something right but on doing the right thing - and doing the right thing in health care depends on the availability of good information. In the future, many of the improvements in health care will come not from better drugs or better doctors, but from better managing information. Indeed, we are on the cusp of witnessing a radical transformation of health care as health care practitioners and patients increasingly embrace the IT tools of the digital age. Already the effects of IT can be seen in the rise of new applications such as telemedicine and the growth of emerging fields such as bioinformatics. In fact, so much is happening that all the IT applications in health care-ranging from applications to streamline paperwork and business processes to extremely advanced clinical applications of IT to drive major medical innovations-are far too numerous to catalog. As discussed below, IT is helping provide four key benefits in health care: * reducing health care costs * increasing access to health information * improving the quality of health care * increasing access to health care Challenges to the adoption and use of health IT adoption, including economic barriers and interoperability issues, have slowed the digital transformation of the health care industry, particularly in the United States, but many of the benefits of health IT can already be found among early adopters. Many health IT applications are still in the early stages of development where their benefits have been tested and proven but have not yet been scaled. Efforts to quantify the benefits of emerging health IT applications are nascent. Researchers have tried to measure the success of health IT applications. But many researchers focus on only one metric of their success-such as user acceptance, economic benefits, usefulness, or improvement in patient safety-rather than conducting a comprehensive evaluation. It is important to note that evaluative studies of health IT with negative findings may reflect an improper implementation of a technology rather than a problem with the technology itself. It is also important to recognize that case studies of health IT with positive findings may be difficult to generalize to a broader context. Even with these caveats, however, available research overwhelmingly points to a future where improvements in IT will continue to open new opportunities for advancements in health care.