Stakeholders

Patients

Nature of Interest in HIT: A patient’s interest in HIT is founded in their personal interest in receiving the best quality of care at an affordable cost. Patients stake in HIT lies with its ability to increase provider/ doctor adherence to guidelines, enhancing disease surveillance, and decrease  medication/ treatment administration errors. 

Plans to Shape HIT: For the reasons stated above, physicians, providers and other health care entities will want to utilize the newest HIT to keep their patient base loyal and provide the best quality of care. For these reasons, patients are arguable the strongest force shaping the future use of health information technology.

Health Care Systems

Nature of Interest in HIT: Health care systems are a conglomerations of entities, governmental or private, working together to finance and deliver health services to the population. Health care systems have a broader interest in HIT as a matter of public policy. HIT affects how quickly diseases can be recognized and controlled, and educating providers and the public on public health issues.

Plans to Shape HIT: Health care systems ultimate goal is to increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of health care delivery. Better technology translates to more cost effective methods of treatment. The increased efficiency of communication technology between health care entities and providers also contributes to cost control.

Physicians

Nature of Interest in HIT: HIT makes it easier for physicians to provide coordinated, high-quality care by streamlining many tasks: sending patient reminders, creating disease registries, prescribing and refilling medications, and viewing lab results, etc.

Plans of Shaping HIT: Plans for Shaping: Physicians can shape HIT by using various forms of HIT within their offices. Physicians should begin by doing a cost/benefit analysis for the implementation and communicating expectations as well as an anticipated timeline with their staff. It is important to consider network configurations and find an ongoing technical support system. The best way for physicians to shape HIT is by using it and continuously finding ways to improve their systems.

Hospitals

Nature of Interest in HIT: Hospitals are in the business of caring for people. In order to be profitable, the hospital needs to provide adequate care in an efficient manner. Research has shown that certain kinds of information technology (IT) – such as computerized physician order entry (CPOE), computerized decision support systems, and bar-coding for medication administration – can limit errors and improve care.

Plans to shape HIT: Plan for Shaping: Hospitals can effectively shape HIT by implementing programs in the following ways: 1) connect their entire network of physicians and staff, 2) create guidelines of the types of EMRs that will be supported by the network and allow physicians to choose their own EMR format within those guidelines, begin the initiative with the “c-suite” - The CEO, CFO and CMIO should take the lead to ensure implementation meets the hospital’s strategic goals.

Vendors/Suppliers

Nature of Interest in HIT: Vendors provide supplies and materials to health care providers and an efficient, developed HIT infrastructure would drastically change aspects of inventory and product delivery. Vendors nature of interest in HIT is not uncommon, improvements in the health care industry could directly increase the profitability of the 3rd party vendors who are early adopters of the technological advances.

Plans to Shape HIT: Vendors plan to shape HIT would involve creating a uniform system that, ancillary to its medical record documentation, also captures the use of raw materials within a health care facility. Vendors would then develop systems that automatically monitor the use of various resources as a short term method for ordering/shipping necessary items and longer term for forecasting usage of materials to assist in budgeting, cost cutting, etc.

 

Public Health Agencies

Nature of Interest in HIT: Public health organizations’ interest in HIT is relatively obvious in that increased adoption and enhancement through regulation has the potential to improve public safety, both at the macro and micro level. At the individual patient level the adoption of HIT can provide greater accuracy in health care delivery while also capturing individual information for use in future health care interaction. At a community wide level HIT has the capacity for fueling research and analysis that can help agencies prepare treatment plans for widespread illness and epidemic.

 

Plans to Shape HIT: Public health organizations, both state and federal, plan to shape HIT through various laws and regulation that continually balance the cost and effectiveness of various segments of HIT. Through these laws and regulations public health organizations will institute rules on technology that will immediate protect the individual by providing doctors with more accurate and complete information and provide unprecedented data in real time to feed researcher analytics focusing on global health issues.

Quality Improvement Organizations

Nature of Interest in HIT: Quality Improvement Organizations, or QIOs, provide monitoring of the quality of care provided to Medicare beneficiaries.  QIOs nature of interest in HIT is to improve quality for the Medicare beneficiaries.  This includes, implementing new technology across all health care organizations to create an accountable quality driven health care system.  Because each state is contracted with a specific QIO, that QIO is responsible for ensuring the effectiveness and quality of the care.  On a large scale, each QIO is naturally interested in increased patient information to ensure Medicare dollars are not wasted.

Plans to Shape HIT: Each state’s QIO contractor is likely to support HIT initiatives through multiple mediums.  This includes general best practices advice to actual initiatives such as the federal Doctor’s Office Quality Information Technology Initiative.  This initiative, for example, formally promotes the adoption of EHR and other data measures for small to medium-sized physician practices.  Plans and initiatives such as these will continue so that each QIO can provide meaningful data to the public and participating organizations in hopes of increasing the quality of care under Medicare reimbursement.

Purchasers/Payers (Insurance)

Nature of Interest in HIT: Purchasers and Payers, or predominately the insurance industry, has a considerable interest in HIT.  The nature of the interest stems from being able to track patient outcomes in hopes of reducing wasteful costs.  By establishing HIT programs within health systems, the insurance industry will be able to track and analyze patient outcomes.  The more standardized HIT programs become, the more information payers will have to approve or deny claims.

Plans to Shape HIT: Many payers are offering additional incentives for implementation of HIT efforts such as Meaningful Use.  This is especially true in rural and critical access hospitals.  These incentives normally come in the form of rewards for meeting quality and efficiency standards.  In the future, payers will support such HIT programs that will provide more meaningful data for the payers to increase savings.  Ultimately, by supporting federal efforts for HIT, payers are looking to use these efforts to reduce costs and increase efficiency.