Increasing use of information technology (IT) in hospitals bodes well for future performance, says a recent report by the Hospital Report Research Collaborative. Dr. Adalsteinn Brown, the collaboration’s principal investigator, claims that: “Health care is a knowledge industry and yet IT investment is relatively low. The extent to which hospitals can do that is a good predictor of future performance.”
Specifically, IT allows hospitals to “improve internal and external hospital communication, refine the quality of patient records, reduce the time it takes to receive diagnostic reports and order supplies, decrease the number of medication errors, facilitate timely patient follow-up and improve access to education materials,” says the report. Order forms for drugs, tests and other items are computerized, as are protocols and formularies that provide decision support. Hospitals also communicate through email, and integrate IT resources with community partners.
The report is one of four for 2003, this one focusing on acute care in Ontario. Produced in partnership with the Canadian Institute for Health Information and based on methods developed by the multi-university research collaborative, the report evaluates hospital performance in 2001-2002 in areas of patient satisfaction, patient care, financial performance and keeping up with change.
The report found that staff in Ontario hospitals had greater access to online medical images, clinical data from a patient’s previous visit, medical databases and other library resources/education materials in 2001-2002 as compared to 2000-2001. They also significantly increased their email usage (there was an increase of approximately 14 percent in the number of physicians who had an internal email address and 11 percent in those with external email addresses). Since, as stated in the report, information technology is “an increasingly important tool in the enhancement of patient-care activities,” the increase in this area will improve hospital performance overall.
Dr. Brown says that larger hospitals, which tend to have higher levels of funding, are more able to integrate information technology into their procedures, and are also more likely to have a higher overall level of organization. He notes that it is difficult to find funds to allocate specifically to IT usage, since most hospital funding is limited. Although the report noted there was an increase in IT usage, it states that hospitals “may not be using information systems to their full potential, perhaps because of costs associated with developing effective clinical systems or lack of technical support capabilities.”
Dr. Brown claims the two biggest obstacles to greater IT use in hospitals are “funding and difficulty in integrating IT into already very busy work.”
