Digital Healthcare Brings Opportunities, Risks

摘要

Healthcare in the United States is going digital, which brings both tremendous opportunities and security risks. Digital healthcare brings the promise of increased quality of care, reduced errors and reduced cost and overhead in the provision of care.Yet the United States lags other countries in the use of technology in healthcare records. Fewer than 10% of hospitals and 16% of doctors use electronic health records.This is about to change. The stimulus act (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) contains a Title IV entitled the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act.The government has included more than $19 billion in direct funding as well as enticements (carrot) and regulatory controls (stick) in this part of the bill. It is likely that more healthcare reforms and digitization efforts will follow both in the general budget and in specific healthcare bills in the near future. On the technology innovation and vendor side an enormous amount of money is being poured into development of technologies and standards around Electronic Health Records (EHR).There is also a high likelihood of new tax incentives pushing for the use of EHRs in the provision of care.