Health Information Technology Benefits

Health Information Technology (HIT) is technology that is used to help make health care easier for all stakeholders—both patients and care providers. Examples of HIT include electronic health records, personal health records, e-prescribing, and online communities. HIT allows information to be communicated, stored and shared among people in the industry, whether they are patients providing care givers with access to information or care givers sharing information with other care givers.

HIT allows and enables the easy transfer of medical and health information in a way that substantially and significantly reduces the amount of time and energy that would conventionally be spent in transferring, recording, storing or sharing information. HIT can impact all aspects of health care because information is needed every time a treatment is needed, a diagnosis is made, a prescription is given—information has to be recorded, stored and shared accordingly.

The easier it is for information to be gathered and used, the better quality care can be provided, so HIT is a great advancement for health care and all health care stakeholders (Chaudhry et al., 2006). 2 Challenges that HIT faces today are that it can be costly for some facilities or organizations to adapt their information methods. IT can also be costly to sustain and maintain, and the more that HIT is used the more health care facilities may have to pay costs for developing, sustaining and maintaining the services.

Another challenge is security and with more and more hacks occurring in organizations, health care facilities will need to be protective of information. That means added cost and energy spent in keeping HIT safe from attacks. These concerns will continue to last well on into the future as hacks and security needs will only get more pronounced from here on out (Meingast et al., 2006). Privacy concerns are another matter and those need to be addressed because patients have a right to have their information protected.

So with HIT comes the challenge of ensuring that patient information is still only shared according to the law. 3 Three fundamental decisions that are of concern for the finance team are that the organization has a positive cash flow, that debts are able to be serviced, and that the budget has enough space for implementing a new IT approach for the organization.

The costs will have to be documented so that the budget can be adjusted, so that debts do not become overwhelming and so that funds are still coming in to be able to cover the cost and ensure that the organization has cash flow (Bergin et al., 2013). The impact of all this on the balance sheet is that the organization will have to be able to sustain operations while implementing new projects so that the balance sheet does not become overweight.

4 The difference between a stakeholder and a stockholder is that a stakeholder can be anyone who is touched by the organization or its services, either directly or indirectly. These can include patients, administrators, members of the community where the organization is based, employees, care providers, insurers, legislators and so on. Stockholders own a piece of the organization and have a financial stake in the company: in other words, they own equity in the organization, which.