Information Technology in Healthcare Administration

Abstract Information technology is one of the major trends in today's world, and it is changing every professional. It is imperative for healthcare leaders to understand the emerging information technologies, and how those technologies can transform the delivery of healthcare and the administration of healthcare institutions. There are several different technologies that will transform the healthcare field in the coming decade. Already, we have seen the emergence of distance health care.

While initially developed for rural communities, the increasing use of apps, ubiquitous high speed internet, and new applications of long-distance health care promises to shift more care to the home, including many diagnostic functions previously only available at healthcare facilities. Artificial intelligence is the next wave in the development of healthcare decision-making systems. AI will advance such systems by imbuing them with the capacity to learn, to continually upgrade their knowledge, to build on what they learn.

These systems will soon become smarter and more capable than human practitioners, with substantial implications for the efficiency and accuracy of health care delivery, and on the administrative side impacting everything from staffing to liability. Supercomputing will have a similar impact to AI – the ability to gather and process massive datasets will revolutionize care by providing evidence-based decision making much more quickly and accurately than was ever possible before.

Data-driven clinical support systems will take health care from a field that still often struggled with the concept of electronic health records directly from the 20th century to the 22nd. Introduction and Major Technologies There are several major information technologies that will transform healthcare over the course of the coming years. In laying out a plan for the next decade, it is important to understand not the individual technologies so much as the broad trends.

The shape and direction of these trends informs us as to the potential developments in the future. We can already imagine what some of these developments will look like – they range from modest improvements over today's technology to quantum leaps that seem more like science fiction.

Healthcare administrators needs to position themselves today, via the decisions that they make, to be ready for these changes in the future, and it starts with understanding the different types of emerging IT on what the implications of that IT will be for health care provision in the future. Artificial Intelligence There is no discussion, in no field of endeavor, about emerging technologies without talking about artificial intelligence (AI). In short, AI seems set to revolutionize our entire existence, in much the same way that the internal combustion engine did.

Many of the most critical applications of AI have yet to even be conceived, but there are some things that we can identify. Bodies from the world's major nations to leading corporations are all betting heavily on AI, and with good reason (Knight, 2018). AI is going to replace human thinking. It is going to run the machines that help us diagnose and treat illness.

Processes today that are dominated by human thought and intelligence could easily be eliminated within the next decade, and this has significant implications for healthcare organizations. AI in healthcare is predicted to radically improve medical care at the clinical level (Bhardwaj, 2018). It will not come cheap – productivity enhancements rarely do – but it will dramatically reduce the reliance on human expertise, and it will reduce the liability risk that healthcare organizations face.

If a plan is in place to embrace this technology, and we make the right strategic investments, we will see substantially reduced costs, and the ability to handle far more patients. There are further implications that will arise from this redesign of care. The design of our physical facilities will be different. The resources that we need to thrive will be different. There will be impacts on our cash flow cycle, on payer behavior, on health outcomes, and on staffing needs.

Roles that do not exist today will be critical tomorrow, and roles that are critical today could be marginalized tomorrow. Building labor flexibility today. Because we do not really know what form AI will take in health care – individual decisions about technology adoption are down the road – we can only go so far down the road for planning.

But we should have a program of reviewing the latest developments in a formal manner, so that we know about these developments before our competitors do, and start to envision the difference ways that AI can help us. It will pay handsomely to be proactive rather than reactive when dealing with this transformational technology. Robotics Robotics may or may not be powered by AI. But regardless of who controls the robots in the service of healthcare, this is another transformational technology (PWC, 2018).

The IT behind robots is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and ranges from micro-robots that enter the body to perform medical procedures, to robots that can perform human tasks like nursing. A robot nurse may not have all the function of a human nurse, but it can spend much more time with patients, and because it doesn't need to sleep can be more productive in many respects. Robots also promise to be vital in the development of increased homecare, helping people to remain independent longer.

A robot caring for a senior in their home, wired to a decision-making algorithm in the cloud, can provide a substantial amount of health care, which can dramatically impact the demand for services delivered at health care clinics, changing the need and form of physical infrastructure for health care service delivery. Supercomputing High performance computing is one of the technologies that will revolutionize health care, and it will probably happen even before AI becomes the norm.

Supercomputing applications include forecasting, modeling, and it will work in a symbiotic relationship with human beings (Armstrong, 2017). Human operators will need to not only understand how to build large, complex data sets, but to make use of them as well. There obviously some significant implications for healthcare administrators. First, the battle for talent will be intense. The ability to wield the power of supercomputing is a significant source of competitive advantage in a number of industries, and health care will be just one more.

Yet, there is a massive shortage of talent working in the field at present, and that shortage will only intensify. There will be issues of implementation – health care has struggled with things like electronic health records, and nurses still debate the merits of evidence-based practice. Seriously – using evidence is controversial.

That's the culture within the healthcare space, so the shift from people who have spent decades working in that environment to one where people are experts at working with computers, wielding data, and leveraging the power of information is a complete and total overhaul. This transformation will happen quickly, too, and quite frankly the health care workforce is entirely unprepared for it.

This will present massive challenges for health care administrators not just in finding talent but in transforming organizational culture, getting buy-in, and one can expect that the competitive landscape will shift, strongly, in favor of any company that is built from the ground up with the principles of data and evidence at its core. Clinical Support Systems Less ground-breaking, clinical support systems are the "today" version of big data applications and AI.

These are systems that contain large bodies of knowledge, and they help health care practitioners to make decisions that are rooted in evidence. A 2005 review of the performance of clinical support systems showed that clinical support systems improve practitioner performance (Garg, 2005). These systems are getting better, and with that the outcomes should be better. There are fewer dramatic implications for clinical support systems than there are for other technologies, in part because these are already mainstream technologies.

Further, they have been proven, so there are fewer barriers to adoption in health care practice. On top of all that, clinical support systems do not represent a threat to people working in health care today, in contrast to systems that will replace human functions. Role of Healthcare Leadership There are two key roles for healthcare leadership in information technology. First, leadership decides which technologies to adopt, through analysis of the technologies and the allocation of resources.

Ovretveit et al (2007) discussed that effective implementation of technology is correlated with improved care, but that technology cannot simply be purchased; a proper implementation plan is required. That is the role of healthcare leadership. It needs to have resources set aside, not just to acquire critical technology but to support its adoption. That means having the infrastructure to manage the IT, training resources, and leadership also needs to know what each.