Implementing Electronic Medical Record Systems

The US healthcare industry is a massive information enterprise, yet it´s surprisingly inefficient when it comes to information management. Some estimates put it decades behind other industries with respect to information technology (IT) adoption and utilization. In fact, an article in the Journal of Healthcare Management described the industry as a knowledge-based enterprise that doesn´t consider knowledge part of its value proposition. A 2003 report found the healthcare industry spending 2 percent of gross revenues on IT compared to 10 percent for other information-intensive industries, such as banking. The consequences of this health IT gap are matters of life and death. In 1999, the US National Academies´ Institute of Medicine published a report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which attributed between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths per year to medical errors. Subsequent studies have confirmed a general assessment of healthcare delivery system as inefficient, unreliable, and even dangerous.