Dear Healthcare Informatics Insider,
When radiologists were planning their department's conversion from paper-based to electronic records, one of the challenges many faced was getting the hospital's IT department to understand the infrastructure, operational, and support requirements for RIS and PACS. Radiology departments often represented a hospital's first digital patient medical record initiative, and hospital IT departments weren't often all that receptive.
In great part for this reason, radiology departments hired their own IT professionals. Only in recent years have hospital IT and radiology IT begun to merge. Yet a common theme in conferences that include healthcare IT -- including RSNA 2011 -- relates to the question of working effectively with hospital IT departments.
That's what makes an Austrian study from UMIT's e-health and telemedicine research division so interesting -- it documents that hospital IT departments in Austria and surrounding regions believe that their primary responsibility is to provide technology, not service using the tools of technology. Read it here.
Contention relating to electronic health records is also addressed in an article by contributing writer Emma Harper, about a session of the recent Digital Healthcare Conference. A professor of health politics discussed the ownership of, and access to, electronic medical records. Click here to learn more.
The need for interoperability and transparent exchange of data and its availability for researchers is a controversial subject, but the U.K. government is paving the way to make anonymized records of National Health Service (NHS) patients available. Click here to learn about the program.
There's no question that healthcare IT will continue to be a huge issue in 2012. Three contributing writers offer their predictions, which you, as a member of the Healthcare Informatics Digital Community, should find of interest.
The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual meeting, which takes place in mid-February, always draws a crowd of up to 30,000, with non-North American registrants increasing in attendance every year. Senior editor Erik Ridley will be there, reporting through our sister publication AuntMinnie.com.
