IT Professional, Lifesaver

One of President Obama's most important initiatives, at least in my opinion, is the modernization of health care. A huge component of this, obviously, is information technology.

Lest there be skeptics or doubters that this push is money and time well-spent, new research confirms what should be intuitively obvious: Effective IT systems in hospitals save lives.

From a Reuters article on internetnews:

Hospitals in Texas that used computers to keep track of patient records and manage care had lower rates of deaths, complications and costs, U.S. researchers said this week, offering a strong argument for hospitals to go "paperless."

They said patients treated in hospitals that ranked highest in use of health information technology to manage patient records and physician notes were 15 percent less likely to die compared with patients in hospitals that ranked lower.

"If these results were to hold for all hospitals in the United States, computerizing notes and records might have the potential to save 100,000 lives annually," Dr. Neil Poe of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, lends fresh evidence that information technology can improve health quality and cut costs by reducing errors. 

This conclusion runs somewhat counter to previous studies, including one last spring by the Congressional Budget Office, that concluded the benefits of health IT were overstated. But earlier studies merely took into account the presence of IT in hospitals. The latest research looked at hospitals where the IT actually was used. And as nearly every IT pro can attest based on their own frustrating experiences, when employees in any enterprise don't use technology, it's hard for there to be any benefit. It's like concluding a netbook isn't helping a content worker who still takes notes exclusively on a legal pad. Gee, ya think?

Health care modernization also benefits more than hospitals and patients, as a CIO Update article from Monday points out:

Adding more fuel to the IT jobs fire likely will be the Obama administration's planned focus on health care modernization. Job site JobFox late last month posted its list of job sectors and key professions most likely to grow as a result of the president's stimulus policies. All of them in the health care space, aside from nurses, are linked to the IT profession: IT specialists, information security specialists, and software developers.

Let's hope the health care modernization drive is not sacrificed at the alter of petty partisan politics. When IT tools are as commonly used in hospitals as stethoscopes, we'll all benefit.