Securing, Digitizing Medical Records Remain Priorities in Healthcare IT

Healthcaretechnology professionals are scrambling to secure their systems with one infour saying they?ve been the victim of a data security breach in the past year,according to a new study.

Identitymanagement and the more general ?security technologies? are among the toptechnologies healthcare IT executives said they planned to implement for thefirst time in the next two years at 45 percent and 42 percent respectively,according to the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)Leadership Survey.  43 percent alsoplaced RFID technology rollouts among their near-term debuts.

Despitethe high number of breaches, the HIMSS survey, sponsored by Cisco Systems,found that healthcare technologists have made significant investments insecurity and disaster recover technologies in the past year, a trend that willcontinue for the next two years. Firewalls are now in place at 98 percent ofrespondent?s facilities, while 83 percent are employing user access controlsand logs to audit access to patient records, the survey found.

?Handinhand with an emphasis on implementing healthcare technology there must be afocus on making this data secure,? said John Wade, HIMSS board chair.  ?Consumers are concerned about the privacy oftheir health information, and this survey suggests that the industry isresponding to those concerns.?

Thehealthcare industry will have to make those improvements even as it faces ITbudget pressure from Medicare cutbacks and reductions in managed-care fees,according to the survey; 26 percent of respondents said lack of financialsupport was the biggest obstacle in IT implementations. Still, the continuedpush to digitize patient records and efforts to reduce medical errors shouldmean more IT jobs and spending in the sector in the coming year, the surveyconcluded. 75 percent said they expected their overall IT budgets to increasein the coming year; 68 percent said they’d increase staff.

The HIMSSstudy found that Electronic Medical Records (EMR) initiatives will be the overalltop priority for healthcare IT organizations through 2010. Roughly 44 percentof respondents said they now have a ?fully operational? EMR system in place, up from 32percent last year and just 24 percent in 2006. Some14 percent were still in theplanning stages and 10 percent admitted they still have no EMR plans at all.

Among theother top priorities for the 307 respondents: 23 percent said they wouldimplement systems to delivery of clinical knowledge to users in the next twoyears; 20 percent said that implementing or upgrading data warehousing and datamining would shift from a low priority to a high priority.

In asignificant shift from last year, bar code technology was on the minds of just35 percent of the survey respondents this year. Bar codes were far and away thetop priority in last year?s survey with 74 percent saying they expected toimplement the technology within two years. Speech recognition also took a hit,dropping to 36 percent this year from 55 percent in 2007.

?Thesurvey should build confidence that healthcare providers are adopting new technologiesto improve patient care and collaboration among care providers,? said FrancesDare, director of healthcare business solutions at Cisco, in a statement.?However, there is also a clear message that Medicare and Medicaid cuts impactIT investment.  With 26 percentindicating such cuts significantly impede their success, we still have work todo to ensure IT is recognized as the powerful enabler of efficiency and betterpatient care that it can be.?

Derigueur for a Cisco sponsored study, participants were also asked about theirplans to implement unified communications technologies. While it officiallymanaged just a sixth-place finish among top priorities with 19 percent, Ciscoofficials said the study results show that UC ?is expected to become more of apriority ? as organizations empower users to connect with each other andhealthcare systems.?