“What Is The Value Of Health IT?”

For its second year of celebrating National Health IT Week, HIMSS is asking a simple question: “What is the value of HIT?”

Seems like a simple question, but there don’t seem to be any simple answers. The fact is there seems to be a different answer depending on who you ask. So, instead of offering my lone — and probably less than expert – opinion I’ve asked a variety of folks who are probably better able to give more insightful and valuable opinions than mine.

Brian Wells, associate vice president of healthcare technology and academic computing, Penn Medicine – UPHS ”The value of Health IT is centered on the liberation of information. The act of capturing health data in electronic form allows that data to be used for multiple purposes: patient care, quality improvement, cost optimization, research, education, etc. The value increases exponentially if the data is stored and shared using structural and semantic standards.  This enables data from multiple sources to be aggregated while retaining its original meaning (value).  The promise of personalized or precision medicine will only be realized if health IT is used to gather the rich phenotypes of all patients and link that to their genotypes.”