For anyone who isn’t aware, and there must be at least one or two of you out there, healthcare IT has a tendency to look the way IT generally did about 30 years ago. There’s lots of reasons for that — a desire to invest in patient services rather than infrastructure, concerns about security and privacy, and a general conservatism in the space. No matter what the causes, it’s clear that healthcare’s historical reluctance to move the needle on technology change has had an impact on patient outcomes.
But in recent years, we’ve seen a change. Of course, the highest-profile event was Obamacare and a move toward results-based funding. But underlying that very important event has also been a more general awareness that things need to change, as well as a broader acceptance that in healthcare, IT can be a major enabler of patient outcomes.
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