If health IT is to meet the challenges of a reformed healthcare system, the industry needs greater investment in health IT innovation, more integrated systems, and a focus on finding ways to enable patients to better manage their health, a Hewlett Packard executive says.
In an interview with InformationWeek, Harry Kim, HP’s director of enterprise business healthcare, argued that the United States is not driving the level of innovation needed to meet the new healthcare realities.
“We have the best medical technology, but our information technology to bring it all together is lacking investments. It lacks the structure inside the country to drive progress,” Kim said.
According to Kim, the healthcare industry currently invests more in medical technology than health IT, and the imbalance is having an impact on vendors’ approach to providing solutions in healthcare.
“When you compare IT investments with medical technology investments, IT always loses and what wins is medical technology investments in, for example, the latest MRI, CT scan, or mammogram equipment. With this medical technology you are essentially building expensive islands of information,” Kim said. “The lack of investment around information technology to bridge those disparate information sets together, that’s where the lack in investments has been,” Kim explains.
Kim’s observations are supported by a recent Dow Jones VentureSource report that revealed that venture capital investments in the medical software and information services segment dropped from 17 deals totaling $69 million in the first quarter of 2009 to eight deals totaling $53 million during the corresponding period in 2010, a 77% decline.
This lackluster investment climate occurred during a recession, but also at a time when the government signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which authorized $20 billion to assist in the development of a robust health IT infrastructure.
HP is closely working with federal and state authorities as the ongoing push to revamp health IT continues. For example, HP handles 35% of all Medicare and Medicaid claims in the United States and each year performs 2.4 billion healthcare transactions, including 1 billion healthcare claims.
Souce: InformationWeek Healthcare
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